Do you ever wondered why you can have 500 odd friends on Facebook friends list, yet only 15-20 show up in your news feed..? It’s not that those other friends have stopped using Facebook; chances are they’re still there. It’s just that they aren’t showing up in your news feed.
If you haven’t noticed, there are now two settings on your Facebook news feed: “Most Recent” which shows most of the content published by your Facebook friends in chronological order and “Top News” which filters content based on EdgeRank.
Edge Rank is the new metrics which Facebook has recently unveiled that allows us to monitor Shares and Clicks. Shares are a very important aspect of EdgeRank. You may not realize it, but News Feed only displays a subset of the stories generated by your friends — if it displayed everything, there’s a good chance you’d be overwhelmed. Developers are always trying to make sure their sites and apps are publishing stories that make the cut, which has led to the concept of “News Feed Optimization”, and their success is dictated by EdgeRank.
Facebook looks at everything published as “objects.” These can be status updates, links, photos, video or anything else that can be shared on Facebook. Every object receives a ranking (EdgeRank), which determines if it will show in your personal newsfeed. Objects with a high EdgeRank appear in your “Top News” feed. Objects with a low EdgeRank will not.
Let’s take a closer look at the three factors that determine EdgeRank.
News Feed Optimization (NFO),
EdgeRank = ∑ue we de
ue = Affinity score between the Viewing User and the Edge Creator.
we = Weight of this Edge type (Likes, Comments, tag etc..,)
de = Time Decay Factor based on how long ago the edge was created.
Affinity is dependent on a user’s relationship with an object in the news feed.
Weight is determined by the type of object, such as a photo/video/link/etc.
Time Decay, as an object gets older, the lower the value.
So how will you get High EdgeRank Score..????
Here we go the following lists factors that determine ranking of items in news feeds or could influence news feed ranking on Facebook.
ELEMENT
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TOPIC
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Description
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Fresh news and activities
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Recency
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Recency of activity (news, tags, comments, likes, link clicks.
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The type of content
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Content
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Status updates, photos, videos, comments
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Who has published the
content item
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Author
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It may be a person, a page, a group, an application. Each will have its own authority and affinity.
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Comments from friends
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Engagement (EDGE)
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The greater the number of comments from friends, the more likely that a story will appear.
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Likes
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Engagement (EDGE)
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Counts could be used, particularly those made recently, possibly calibrated on the basis of the authority of who has done the liking and / or the rate of liking.
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Clicks on links, if present
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Engagement (EDGE)
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Facebook tracks all links to external sites. It is easy to imagine that this data is used as news feed item ranking signal.
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Personal Behavior history
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Engagement (EDGE)
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A user has historically shown greater interest in news by a certain author or of a certain type.
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Something else you should know about is the lifecycle of Facebook “news”. No piece of news will last forever. Unlike ranking on Google where you have an unlimited life span, Facebook news is sort of limiting. As users constantly update their profiles and post new content, it has to be seen. Pretty much all Facebook content is displayed in the news feed. There is just no way of keeping yourself “in the news”. However, you can definitely increase the life span of a certain piece of news which you would like to have by simply using the factors above and by Engagement especially which I explained above.
In my next post will dicuss few more on the stuff required to attain high EgdeRank and factors need to do in Optimizing our NFO (News Feed Optimization).
Your suggestions and feedback are most welcome...!!!!
