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Tag: EdgeRank

  • Facebook To Show Users Less Text Status Updates From Pages

    Last month, Facebook launched what some considered to be its “Panda update”. The company revealed that it had tweaked the News Feed algorithm to promote higher quality content, and essentially give more weight to news stories over memes and similar content.

    Facebook has now announced a further tweak.

    The News Feed now treats text status updates from pages differently than ones from regular users. According to the company, it has seen that people write more status updates (9 million more per day on average) when their friends write status updates, but the effect is not the same with updates from Pages. Therefore, they’re not going to show text status updates from pages as much.

    “We are learning that posts from Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so that we do a better job of differentiating between the two types,” says News Feed ranking product manager Chris Turitzin. “This will help us show people more content they want to see. Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.”

    According to Turitzin, the best way to share a link on Facebook after the update is to use a “link share.” That means using the actual link option to share, as opposed to just including the link at the end of a text update.

    Facebook link shares

    It will be interesting to see how the new update affects visibility of posts for brands, who have suffered greatly since the last big update.

    Image via Facebook

  • Facebook Messes With News Feed Again, Presents New Visibility Challenges

    Facebook has been messing around with the way the News Feed works again, even as many people are still waiting to even get access to the “new” News Feed design the company unveiled all the way back in March. This has implications not only for users, but for businesses who rely on reaching customers in one of the most-viewed spots on the Internet.

    Are the changes Facebook has been making to the News Feed good or bad for businesses? For users? Let us know what you think.

    Facebook announced that it has made an update to the News Feed ranking algorithm, making organic stories that people didn’t scroll down far enough to see reappear near the top of the feed when they’re getting a bunch of likes and comments. This is being referred to as “story bumping”.

    Facebook has been testing the change, and shared some data points surrounding it.

    “In a recent test with a small number of users, this change resulted in a 5% increase in the number of likes, comments and shares on the organic stories people saw from friends and an 8% increase in likes, comments and shares on the organic stories they saw from Pages,” says Facebook’s Lars Backstrom.

    “Previously, people read 57% of the stories in their News Feeds, on average,” says Backstrom. “They did not scroll far enough to see the other 43%. When the unread stories were resurfaced, the fraction of stories read increased to 70%.”

    Well, that sounds pretty good for both users and businesses, no? This way, as a user, you’re going to see more content you missed, some of which you might actually be interested in. As a business, it means you have more chances to get in front of users, which has become increasingly hard to do (at least without paying Facebook). While we say the News Feed is presenting new challenges, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be more challenging to attain visibility. It just means there are new factors to consider.

    But make no mistake. It will still be a challenge to get in front of users. Facebook reportedly said that 1,500 potential stories are filtered from your News Feed on any given day.

    The company also announced some other interesting changes called “Last Actor” and “Chronological By Actor”.

    The first looks at the 50 most recent people you engaged with on Facebook, and shows more of them in the feed. The latter aims to put updates from friends in chronological order when they post a series of updates, which makes sense in the case of live-Facebooking events, TV shows, games, etc.

    Story Bumping is reportedly live on the desktop and is rolling out to mobile, while Last Actor has rolled out, and Chronological By Actor is coming in the future.

    Ari Rosenstein, VP of Marketing for Facebook PMD Adotomi says, “The News Feed has clearly been the key to Facebook’s success over the last two quarters. It seems like such a natural feature to be in a social network, but it has truly revolutionized our personal communication and proved to be the revenue driver that Facebook was searching for since it’s IPO. The News Feed is where we instinctively go to get the latest information about our friends, but also about the world. Often we find out about greater news events because of the reactions to news stories by our friends and family. If YouTube is our custom picked media channel, then the Facebook News Feed is the media channel our friends pick for us. All of the content is picked by others yet it retains a very high degree of relevancy to us, making one of the best information recommendation and discovery engines out there.”

    “News Feed improvements like ‘Last Actor’ and ‘Story Bumping’ are going to make newsfeed content even more targeted and relevant for users which is a great benefit,” Rosenstein adds. “For advertisers they should look to focus more on ads in the News Feed and less on page posts to Fans as ads will allow for better targeting, larger reach, and the ability to better control the duration of the message.”

    EdgeRank, which has historically been the foundation for Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, is apparently no longer a thing, at least in name. Now it’s just the News Feed Algorithm.

    “While the name ‘EdgeRank’ may be disappearing, News Feed content will still be ranked based on weighing factors like user affinity and the number and types of engagements a post receives; factors that are already in use with EdgeRank. However, the importance of optimizing for previous EdgeRank factors like time decay is changing significantly,” writes Adam Greenwald at marketing firm iCrossing.

    “These changes highlight a distinct difference: it’s now not just how recently a story was posted that matters, but how recently you engaged with that user or Page,” he notes. “With these new adjustments to Facebook’s algorithm, the winning strategy for brands will include optimizing not only for the timing and frequency of Page posts, but for frequent Page engagements. Optimizing for maximum engagement should continue to be first and foremost in the minds of social marketers.”

    In other words, don’t just expect to say things on your Facebook Page, and expect them to be seen by a large number of people. The more you actually engage with your fans, and expand combinations, the more likely you will have a successful post, visibility wise.

    Facebook is discussing the ongoing changes it makes to News Feed in a new series of blog posts. This began this week with one about Story Bumping (though it’s not actually referred to as that in the post). You can expect others to appear on the Facebook For Business blog.

    Facebook also completed the roll-out of Graph Search in the U.S. This also has very significant implications for businesses, particularly local businesses. The implications will only expand as the feature’s functionality does. The company reminded us that it is still working on features like the ability to search for posts, comments, and of course Graph Search for mobile.

    The company is also testing Trending Topics in its apparent efforts to become more like Twitter – a place for public conversations. There are going to be marketing opportunities on that front as well.

    Do you like what Facebook is doing with the News Feed? Do you consider the updates improvements? Let us know in the comments.

  • New Facebook Features Make It Easier for Users to Receive More Content from Pages They Like

    In the past month, Facebook has been accused of slightly altering their EdgeRank algorithm – the one that determines what posts show up in your news feed. There has been widespread criticism from many page owners, who claim that their posts are becoming less and less visible on their fans’ news feeds due to the change. The theory coming out of the camp of miffed users is that Facebook is dialing back pages’ visibility in order to force pages to pay to promote their posts.

    Facebook’s motivations aside, high profile Facebook users have spoken out about the problem. Now, a couple of new tests from the company may assuage some gripes by giving users the option to see most or all of the pages they follow’s posts.

    Lisa Jenkins noticed that her navigation bar included a new link, to something called “Pages Feed.” It appeared right under the “like pages” link on the left-hand side under “Pages.” Upon investigation, she found that it took her to a feed of all of the updates from all of the pages she likes. Every one of them.

    Inside Facebook found that any user can access their own personal “Pages Feed” right now, even if they don’t see the new section in their homepage navigation bar.

    At Facebook.com/pages/feed, users are shown “recent updates from Pages they’re connected to.” Of course, this is currently in test mode and Facebook tests tons of features all the time – but this would allow users to interact with all of the content from pages with a single click from the homepage.

    Another feature to increase Page visibility is the “Get Notifications” option. This allows users to hover over the “liked” button at the top of a Page’s Timeline and select to receive notifications every time that specific page makes a post.

    “We are currently rolling out the ability for people to receive notifications from specific pages, friends, or public figures that they are connected to. This feature will help people keep up with the people and things that they care about most,” the company told All Facebook.

  • Facebook Sponsored Stories: Unavoidable For Brands?

    Facebook is going public soon. You already knew that I’m sure. You probably also know that Facebook makes most of its money from ads. Not all of it, but a very significant portion. If the company’s relationship with Zynga ever sours, it may have to rely on ad revenue even more.

    There is still plenty of room for Facebook to grow ad revenue, even if there’s less room for it to grow users. For example, they don’t even have mobile ads yet, though that is expected to come soon. That should be another huge source.

    Recently, Facebook began showing Sponsored Stories in the news feed. These are posts that are arleady out there on Facebook, which brands can decide to promote for increased visibility among the people connected to that post, whether it be from a friend or from a Page they “like”.

    The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting piece about how brands are essentially being forced to pay for advertising on Facebook to reach users, simply because the visibility of free Page posts has declined so much. There is so much content flooding users’ News Feeds, and of course Facebook controls what users are seeing via their algorithm, based on what the company calls “EdgeRank.” More on EdgeRank here.

    Some are finding it harder to get posts to gain traction.

    The Journal cites a study from BlitzLocal, saying that between June 1 and Dec. 31 of 2011, unpaid displays of marketing posts to users decreased 33% among the firm’s over 300 clients.

    “Content that used to live for a day may now live minutes in a user’s News Feed,” CEO Dennis Yu is quoted as saying. The piece looks at retailer Gordman’s specifically, as a company which has felt the need to turn to sponsored stories just to gain some visibility. The company reportedly found that sponsored stories increased the number of users who saw a post by over 100,000.

    Basically, what this all means is that if you don’t pay Facebook for ads, you’re left to the mercy of their algorithm for visibility, and who knows just how Facebook is tweaking that? Does it remind you of the search marketing game?

    There is one key difference, however. Facebook does allow users to adjust the way they view their News Feed, so you can see stories by time, rather than what Facebook’s algorithm handpicks for you to see. This is the way many users do view their news feed. I have no idea what the numbers look like in terms of how how many people do this, and how often, but I’m guessing many, many people don’t bother. That’s likely where those extra 100,000 users come in.

    Whether or not advertisers choose to pay for sponsored stories, brands are still going to want to take full advantage of the free marketing benefits of the world’s largest social network. To do that, you have to consider that EdgeRank algorithm, and of course engage on Facebook.

    Sundeep Kapur, a guest author on BlitzLocal’s blog, said in a recent post:

    Successful brands need to focus on increasing interaction effectiveness with their consumer base. You do this by increasing the frequency of exposure, paying close attention to what is being discussed, and focused advertising.

    Interactions with consumers will occur as you post and more than 70% of the interaction occurs within the first hour. So keep up your efforts on posting more often and monitoring right after you post versus posting and “going to bed.” Also, a post with a “question” tends to drive increased interaction.

    Don’t forget that advertising does work. Your engagement rate can go up by 21% to 43% by knowing what to say, when to say, and of course how you say things on Facebook.

    In a separate post, the firm, after conducting research on both large and small brands, also suggested:

  • posting when your users are most likely to be online
  • running sponsored stories to amplify organic postings
  • substituting humor and discounts for boring promotional posts
  • not applying SEO methods to Facebook (such worrying about keywords, page titles, etc.)
  • building an open graph app with actions to avoid getting drowned out of the news feed

    • Some valuable tips. At least only one of these (sponsored stories) is something you have to actually pay Facebook for. Unfortunately, that might be the one that helps you drive visibility more than anything. That is, unfortunately for businesses with tight marketing budgets. Fortunately for Facebook, as it aims to boost revenue as a public company.

    I wouldn’t be surprised to see it become even harder for brands to get their messages through without sponsored stories. What do you think?

  • EdgeRank and Facebook News Feed Optimization

    EdgeRank and Facebook News Feed Optimization

    There’s an interesting report out today from Buddy Media, a company that’s built a business out of creating Facebook tools for businesses, and counts major brands like Target, Johnson & Johnson, and ABC (to name a few) among its clients. It’s also the company Demand Media recently partnered with to help brands increase their Facebook integration with the company’s Pluck platform.

    The report looks at Facebook’s “EdgeRank,” which is the basis for the algorithm the social network uses to determine what shows up in your news feed. It’s pretty important if you’re worried about visibility, which I’m assuming you are if you’re reading this.

    Facebook discussed EdgeRank at F8 (Facebook’s developer conference) last year. Buddy Media’s Allie Rolnik sums it up pretty well: “Overall, EdgeRank is based on three factors: affinity, weight and relevancy. When multiplied together, they have the ability to push your content to the New Feed’s ‘Top News,’ where fans will be able to see what your brand has to say. For instance, an image with dozens of Comments will have a higher affinity score than a status update with a few ‘Likes.’ In addition, and object’s relevancy will help determine how high it will appear within the ‘Top News.’ Any item that appears within the News Feed — such as a status update or video — is called an object, and any action taken on the object — such as a ‘Like’ or Comment — is called an edge.”

    The report cites a recent CNN survey indicating that 75% of respondents get their news from social networking sites like Facebook or through email. Clearly, you want to get in the news feed.

    Shockingly, it takes putting out interesting content that people want to engage with.

    Without getting into all of the meat and potatoes of the report (you can do so yourself by downloading it), I will re-post the ten tips it provides for brands to boost their EdgeRank and get audiences engaged:

    1. Ask questions
    2. Post games and trivia
    3. Interact with fan engagement
    4. Incorporate wall sapplets (polls, coupons, etc.)
    5. Incorporate relevant photos
    6. Relate to current events
    7. Incorporate videos
    8. Post content for time-sensitive campaigns
    9. Include links within posts
    10. Be explicit in your posts

    If you don’t mind a plug, you might find our own SocialDitto tool to be an effective way for helping bring in user engagement as well. What it does is allow you to embed your Facebook posts into articles and blog posts (displaying the number of likes and comments the post has received). This lets you push the conversation out to more people beyond just Facebook, and can inspire others to check out your Facebook Page, get involved with the conversation, and possibly boost your presence in the news feed.

    WebProNewsWhat strategies do you use to get your Facebook fans more engaged with your Page? 34 seconds ago · Like · Comment

    Of course it can’t hurt to use the analytics tools Facebook provides you either. Arik Hason recently wrote a great post on 5 Facebook Insights metrics to track, and why.

    The main takeaway is the same one that can be applied to content marketing in general. You simply need to provide interesting stuff that people care about and want to respond to. If you do this across all of your marketing channels, your chances for success are going to be a lot better.