[Part 2] Facebook EdgeRank and GraphRank Explained

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In this [part 2] post, we attempt to further clarify Facebook EdgeRank and GraphRank; and more importantly, help you put that knowledge to work.

If you haven’t already read through Facebook EdgeRank and GraphRank Explained part 1, go back and read it now. After reading Facebook EdgeRank and GraphRank Explained part 1 you should know that Facebook uses an algorithm known as “EdgeRank.” This “scoring” system determines who and what appears on users’ news feed. The news feed is key to Facebook marketing — this is where you will gain viewership from prospective new customers.

However, before you can gain that viewership you have to have a clear understanding of Facebook EdgeRank and the rules that define it. This can make or break your social media marketing campaign. It is critical to understand three key elements: Affinity, Weight and Time Decay.

Facebook EdgeRank: Affinity explained

In part 1 OF Facebook EdgeRank and GraphRank Explained, you learned that Affinity relates to the proximity of the user’s relationship with the item’s creator. While that seems fairly simple to understand, it often gets misapplied. Many people forget that affinity only works one-way. This means that just because you have been visiting a long forgotten friend’s profile and you comment on a photo or comment that you will now start appearing on their news feed. However, if you comment on an item on their wall and they comment back then that would lead to them having a greater Affinity to you.

Facebook EdgeRank: Weight explained

Weight is a simple Facebook EdgeRank formula that decides what content is more likely to show up in the news feed than other content. Although there is no real definitive pattern to Weight, there are definitely certain items that carry a higher ranking within Facebook EdgeRank Weight.

Within Facebook EdgeRank Weight, items that rate the highest are videos, photos and links. Therefore, in order to use weight to benefit your business, you have to rethink how you are communicating using Facebook. If you want to reach as many new customers as possible then you should try to include such items in your posts.

It is also important to realize that not everyone of your friend’s Weight ranking is the same. The person who enjoys clicking on links is probably going to see your link posts more often then the person who prefers pictures. Similarly, the person who likes pictures is going to see your pictures more often then the person who likes links. This information should encourage you to vary your posts.

Facebook EdgeRank: Time Decay explained

The last piece of the Facebook EdgeRank puzzle is Time Delay. Simply stated, a newer item is more likely to appear than an older item. Unlike Twitter, which is controlled by only chronological order, Facebook EdgeRank also takes into account Affinity and Weight.

With this in mind it is important to consider the timing of your posts. One thought is to create posts during the times your audience will most likely be using Facebook thus decreasing the Time Decay and increasing the probability of it showing up on their news feed. In other words, posting when other people are less likely to be posting content reduces the competition and forces yourself into a spot on their news feed.

Additional things you can do to increase your EdgeRank

Constant interaction is key to driving your Facebook marketing campaign. Plan for important announcements. Start increasing your Facebook EdgeRank Affinity now. If you know you will be making a big announcement, maybe you invite conversation and input from friends or you ask for feedback on a picture. The comments you receive will increase your chances of appearing on their news feed and therefore your overall Facebook EdgeRank score will increase.

Research shows that using keywords like Why, When, Where, and Would greatly increases the likelihood of comments and likes which raises your Facebook EdgeRank Weight value.

Post frequently and use Time Decay to your benefit by determining when your friends are using Facebook. Also factoring in when you get the most interaction from your friends. Pay attention to when there seems to be lulls in status updates and post at those times to ensure a spot in the news feed.

Consider the content in your status updates and how others perceive them. People are drawn to things that are interesting, relatable, honest, and that appeal to their emotion. So before you hit enter and post your status update ask yourself, “is this interesting? Can others relate to me? Am I being honest? Is there any emotional appeal?” All of these will help you create content that will increase your interaction with your friends and help with Facebook EdgeRank.

The Additional Element of Facebook GraphRank

As previously noted in Part 1, GraphRank mainly targets those who develop Facebook apps. Like Facebook EdgeRank, the more a friend uses an app the higher the GraphRank. While Facebook EdgeRank focuses more on the interactions with comments and likes, GraphRank interaction comes with using the app. More importantly, they have to hear about it often and see their friends using it.

Many of the suggestions for increasing your Facebook EdgeRank also apply to GraphRank; however, this is where Time Decay can really come into play. Note when your friends are online and interacting with you and share at those times in order to appear on their news feed. Also be aware of lulls in activity and post at those times so that when they turn on Facebook your app post will appear in their news feed.

Return to top: [Part 2] Facebook EdgeRank and GraphRank Explained

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NEW Facebook Timeline — A Billion Channels of Reality TV?

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NEW Facebook Timeline? This is your life.

We all know the phrase. It’s a throwback to a 1950s television show that walked through the life stories of its guests in front of friends, family… and a national television audience.

The odd part about the original This Is Your Life, the part many people don’t realize, is that the show was oddly, awkwardly personal in a way that modern-day reality TV doesn’t even come close to. There was the episode, for example, when one of the men who flew the plane that dropped The Bomb over Hiroshima was greeted by a surprise guest: A Japanese survivor. It was a tense television moment, to say the least.

Now, as the Facebook Timeline officially rolls out, users argue loudly amongst themselves over whether or not the social media version of “This is your life” is a good thing – another social networking innovation from Facebook – or a bad thing – another invasion, or potential invasion, of our privacy. Some people are saying that Facebook Timeline is just too personal, too convenient for online stalkers, too creepy to publicly lay out your entire life, together with all its best moments, its missteps, and its mundanity.

NEW Facebook Timeline? Am I About to Be Owned? Do I Care?

Our tendencies towards compulsive voyeurism and unabashed curiosity about the personal lives of others – not to mention the compulsiveness with which we pour over, analyze, and revisit our own life experiences — have never been so easily fulfilled. However, thanks to Facebook Timeline, not only can we visually conceptualize our life as a series of interconnected events, we can also see, within the Facebook Timeline, what our friends are listening to, cooking, reading, watching, and what their latest running route was.

Our ability to see what our friends are cooking and where they’re running, of course, are all conveniently provided to us through free apps by the brands that want to sell to us. The question for Facebook users becomes, “Does it bother me that all these apps have subtle marketing messages behind them?”

The answer Facebook suggests is that, no, it shouldn’t bother you at all. It’s natural to want to see what your friends are up to. It’s natural to want to know what movies they’ve seen recently and what books they’re reading. Facebook is wagering that the majority of their users will favor convenience and connection over philosophical issues with Facebook Timeline.

NEW Facebook Timeline? No, I Don’t Care.

Facebook is almost definitely right. Consumers have been using brands as a form of self-expression for decades; Facebook Timeline just makes that self-expression easily accessible in real-time. Facebook users who sympathize with Occupy Wall Street might complain about Facebook Timeline and its emphasis on integrating brands and our personal lives for a while, but sooner or later even Occupiers will want to share with their activist friends what brand of sleeping bag they’re using to keep warm as they protest the meteoric rise of big business.

Speaking of brands, there’s another question Facebook Timeline raises: Once the majority of Facebook users have adopted Timeline, how will it impact your own social media marketing? Here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. Be Included in the App Revolution

For just a moment, take your sales hat off and put your connectivity hat on. People use Facebook to connect, relax, and have fun. How can your brand create an app that helps them to do that?

Netflix, for example, has just about gotten Congress to allow them to launch a Facebook app that will use people’s friends’ movie preferences to make movie recommendations. In other words, it will be exactly what Facebook has been trying to accomplish with its advertising, but since users will voluntarily share their information, these apps might just clear the “privacy issues” hurdle.

2. Expect Facebook Timeline to Come to Brand Pages

Facebook hasn’t yet rolled out Facebook Timeline for brand pages, but once they do – and they probably will – that is one bandwagon you’ll want to jump on right away.

Why? For starters, Facebook Timeline puts a huge photo right at the top of the profile page. The 849 x 312 pixel cover photo of a Facebook Timeline page gives brands a chance to feature the perfect product shot or clever banner in a way that the existing Facebook pages do not.

3. You’d Better Get Interesting

The new Facebook Timeline format increases the likelihood that a brand’s self-promoting posts will never be seen by fans. Anything Facebook algorithms deem uninteresting will get relegated to the Ticker. Posts such as videos, photos, links, and content that earns lots of likes are far more likely to reach to reach the eyes of fans.

* * *

Facebook, along with the Internet in general, have rapidly changed how we think about and interact with our friends and our world. Back in the early days of blogging, some people asked, “Why in the world would anyone want to make their private thoughts available for everyone to read?” Today, sharing private moments as encapsulated in photos or posts is so second-nature that almost no one questions it any longer. Facebook Timeline is just the latest evolution in this trend of making our personal lives increasingly public. Though consumers might complain now, brands who want to succeed will find smart ways to use Facebook Timeline to tell their own stories and offer help as fans tell theirs.

Return to top: Op-Ed: NEW Facebook Timeline? A Billion Channels of Reality TV?

What do you think about the new Facebook Timeline? Share your thoughts below.

Remember Me? I’m Your Customer.

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You already know how to build your brand through social media marketing. You’re already on top of the changes that Facebook announced at the 2011 f8 Developers’ Conference. You’re also well-aware of the fact that you need to interact with your social media consumers, not just constantly pitch to them. As such, you’re always looking for ways to increase interaction and dialogue with Facebook fans.

You follow all the social media rules of engagement because you want to build your social brand. That’s fine – building your social brand is your job. However, have you ever stopped to ask yourself what’s in it for your fans and followers? You know what you’re getting out of your social media relationship with them; what are they getting out of it?

The better you understand what your social media followers are getting from their relationship to your brand, the better and faster you will be able to build your social brand. Let’s have a little Being John Malkovich moment and travel inside your followers’ heads.

1. Social media consumers want to save money

One of the greatest perks to social media consumers is the ability they gain to find deals and save money. They are no longer chained to whatever they can find at their local retail stores; unfettered, they prowl Facebook pages and join email lists with the intention to save a couple bucks on products they like or think they might like.

Here are some social media statistics you need to know:

88% of women and 70% of men say that promotions were what motivated them to subscribe to emails from a company (Source: InternetRetailer.com)
40% of consumers who “Like” a Facebook page do so in the hopes that they will receive discounts; this is the top reason they click “Like” (Source: SocialMediaExaminer.com)
Another 36% of consumers say they follow Facebook business pages to get a freebie or coupon (Source: SocialMediaExaminer.com)
Put the two above statistics together and you’ll see that 76% of Facebook fans are hoping to get a deal of some kind
43.5% of Twitter users start following a brand in the hopes of deals and discounts; this is also the number one reason for following a Twitter user (Source: GetSatisfaction.com Blog)
70% of social media users who follow brands report that they have participated in a sweepstakes or other brand-sponsored contest (Source: GetSatisfaction.com Blog)

2. Social media consumers want to display their personality

Interestingly enough, the same social media study that found the #1 reason for following a brand is the somewhat predictable wish to save money found that the #2 reason for following a brand is to publicly display their brand affiliation. Receiving discounts was the top reason for 40% of respondents; showing support for a brand was the top reason for 39% (Source: SocialMediaExaminer.com).

In other words, Facebook users will frequently “Like” a page simply for the purpose of self-expression. Understanding this, you may wish to think more about what following your page says about a person and how you can tweak that meaning to reach out via social media to more people and the right people.

3. Social media consumers want to be entertained

While people use a site like Google principally to find information, people are often using sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter for the same reasons that they turn on the television: They want to be entertained.

As part of their drive to be entertained, Facebook users continue to consume Facebook apps at a rapid rate. Facebook’s own statistics state that “more than 500 million people use an app on Facebook or experience Facebook Platform on other websites” each month (Source: Facebook.com).

Facebook games continue to blow the minds of their creators. Data from September 2010 reveals this about Facebook games:

53% of all Facebook users play social games, or 56 million each day
Unlike the typical gamer profile, these gamers are 69% women
50% of all Facebook logins are for game playing
The average gamer plays for 210 minutes each month

(Source: AllFacebook.com)

4. Social media influencers have their own agenda

Much has been written about creating “brand evangelists” — influential bloggers and consumers who will build your brand for you just because they like you so darn much. However, it’s important not to be sucked in to the evangelism about brand evangelists. Don’t be naïve; most of these influencers review, write about, and promote your brand and products as part of building their own brand.

Independent reviewers and bloggers are mostly interested in building their own fan base and sphere of influence. When you reach out to an influencer, you must remember that their agenda is just as self-promoting as yours is. Therefore, ask yourself how your brand can benefit the influencer before reaching out and suggesting a collaboration.

Now that you’ve gotten a glimpse of what’s going on inside your followers’ minds, reexamine your social media outlets and check to see if you are actually meeting their needs. You might be great at posting surveys and responding to comments right away, but have you really taken the time to consider why your social media fans are following you in the first place? Once you align the content you provide with the reasons consumers follow your brand, your social media success will skyrocket.

Don’t know why your existing fans are following you? Here’s a novel approach: Ask them.

Return to top: Social Media Brand Engagement: What’s in it for the Consumer?

Have some thoughts on this topic or general comments? Share them below.

Google vs. Facebook: What Your Business Needs to Know

Posted Leave a commentPosted in Innovation, Random Acts of Progress, Visionary

Two emperor-warriors, each restlessly probing for the other’s Achilles’ heel. Brilliant field commanders and generals, making sacrifices and sometimes falling in battle. A recently deceased king, with a potential power vacuum left in his wake. Is it Greek history? No – it’s Silicon Valley, with their own epic story of the Clash of the Titans. It’s Google versus Facebook, Page versus the Zuck, search versus social media. It will be a great story one day for history books and memoir writers; in the meantime, as marketers we need to know how to work with both of these superpowers without offending either.

Google vs. Facebook: Two Competing Paradigms for Gathering Information

Google and Facebook represent far more than two powerful companies fighting for market share. Rather, their two business models represent two dramatically different paradigms of what the Internet should be or should evolve into. To understand these two paradigms, it’s helpful to briefly review the life stories of the two emperor-warriors of the online world: Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg.

Larry Page is a computer scientist and math guy with two computer scientist parents. He visualized the Internet as being one huge graph, and with his fellow Stanford Ph.D. student, Sergey Brin, Google became the ultimate calculus equation. Google’s strength still lies within the mathematical precision of its algorithms.

Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, eleven years Page’s junior. Whereas Page was the son of two computer scientists with one older brother, Zuckerberg was the son of a psychiatrist and a dentist and grew up surrounded by three sisters. Though the book Accidental Billionaires would later portray Zuckerberg as a cold-hearted, socially isolated computer geek, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Computer geek, yes, but socially isolated? Zuckerberg was a frat guy planning to double-major in computer science and psychology before he dropped out to pilot Facebook. He is, and always has been, a very smart, very geeky, but also very social guy.

Zuckerberg and Page’s orientation towards gathering and parsing information are reflected by their two different inventions. Page created a mathematical formula to sort that which was worth knowing from that which was not. Zuckerberg, the computer geek frat guy, created something totally different – a way to sort what was worth knowing from what was not based on what your buddies thought. For Page, the Internet was a fascinating robot, a machine. For Zuckerberg, the Internet was a newly discovered life form, a living, breathing, ever-evolving organism.

Google Plays Catch-Up

It turns out that other people like Zuckerberg’s paradigm of what the web should be. Like the Blob, Facebook has spread itself relentlessly across the web, quietly oozing into places like Yelp, Spotify, and on every blog and news media site known to man. Its presence is now inescapable; as a result, many of its 800 million users spend more time at Facebook than at any other corner of the online universe.

Just as Microsoft realized it had miscalculated the importance of search and tried desperately to catch up with Google, Google is now in the position of desperately trying to catch up with Facebook when it comes to social media. The new Google+ is trying hard to grab a bigger piece of the social media pie for Google and is proving that Google hasn’t become so big that it can’t still evolve.

While Google+ might just give Facebook a run for its money, Facebook launched its own set of aggressive changes at its recent f8 developers event. From the new timeline feature, to verbs other than “Like,” to relegating uninteresting bits of news to the ticker, the f8 event sent a tidal wave of changes across the social web. Just when it thought it was gaining on Facebook, Google+ is once again two steps behind.

Three Takeaways for Your Business

Those of us who rely upon the might of Google and Facebook to market our products and services may not care who ends up as Silicon Valley’s undisputed ruler; we mostly just want to know how to use the two companies’ battle spoils to boost business. Here are three takeaways from the Clash of the Silicon Titans that you can apply to your own marketing:

1. Zuckerberg’s paradigm is probably going to win, but that doesn’t mean that Page’s paradigm is going to go away. Search and social media are eventually going to live in symbiotic harmony. For the foreseeable future, we will continue to use Google as the primary means to look up phone numbers, get directions, find the closest pizza joint, and learn the final score of last night’s football game. However, once we click on the pizza joint’s site or visit our favorite football blog, we’ll immediately see which of our Facebook friends have already been there and we’ll be influenced by what they have to say about it. Who finds your content is now just as important as – and influences — if your content is found in the first place.

2. Pay-per-click is still best left with Google, but not for much longer. At the moment, Google is poised to conquer a whopping 41% of the US online advertising market. This is still one arena where Facebook is playing catch-up to Google. However, they are catching up fast. Ad analytics are still stronger with Google, but Facebook has social media and word-of-mouth on its side. For the time being, ROI with Google’s AdWords is stronger, but sharing your PPC budget with Facebook isn’t a bad idea.

3. Online video will be a field commander in both armies. Google owns YouTube; Facebook shares videos. With the new f8 changes, videos are weighted more heavily than other types of content, meaning that a video you upload is more likely to make it into your fans’ news feed. Whether you’re trying to dominate the search engine results page or get your message to spread on Facebook, online video will be an increasingly important part of your efforts.

This war between Google and Facebook probably isn’t going to end in a clear victory for either side. For now, Facebook will continue to rule social media, but Google will continue to rule search. While we still need both, as a marketer, you can’t afford to neglect either one. Caught in the middle of these Titans, make sure you are paying due homage to each — unless you want your business to become collateral damage.

Return to top: Google vs. Facebook: What Your Business Needs to Know

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Facebook EdgeRank and GraphRank Explained

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You want to make the most of your business’ Facebook page, but when you start reading articles with phrases like “time decay,” “Facebook EdgeRank algorithm,” and “affinity variable,” your eyes glaze over and you click the “Back” button on your browser as quickly as possible. However, if you truly want your social media marketing to reach your audience and convert browsers into buyers, you need to understand Facebook’s EdgeRank and GraphRank. What follows is a non-techie explanation of Facebook EdgeRank and GraphRank, and how to apply your new understanding to improve your Facebook page’s impact on your business.

What is Facebook EdgeRank?

The average Facebook user has a lot of Facebook friends and follows plenty of Facebook pages. If every single action of a friend showed up in a user’s News Feed, that user would be totally overwhelmed. In order to optimize a user’s News Feed, a formula called Facebook EdgeRank was created. Facebook EdgeRank decides what’s most important to display in the News Feed. If Facebook EdgeRank decides it’s not important, then it gets dropped off the Feed – very bad news for a business owner who isn’t getting much Facebook interaction from fans and wants his or her brand to stay in the forefront of people’s minds.

There are three basic components to the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm: Affinity, weight, and time decay.

“Affinity” refers to the user’s relationship with the item’s creator. For example, if you have an old acquaintance whose Facebook profile you haven’t visited in two years, they would have a very low affinity ranking. If you have a significant other whose profile you visit every day, they would have a very high affinity ranking. This is good for Facebook EdgeRank.

“Weight” combines what the item is and how it’s being interacted with. As for the “what,” videos, photos, and links are generally considered to have the highest weight. In other words, if a fan views a video on your page, this will score far more points in Facebook EdgeRank than if they simply visit your page.

The other component to Facebook EdgeRank is how the item is being interacted with. A “Like,” for example, gets less weight than a comment.

“Time decay” refers to how recent the item is. Old news drops out of the news feed, so newer items are more likely to appear on a feed than older items. Understanding this, to increase your Facebook EdgeRank, post your links, comments, and photos at times when your users are most likely to be logged in to Facebook.

Strategies to Increase Your Facebook EdgeRank

Now that you understand the basics of Facebook EdgeRank, how do you increase the likelihood that your products or services will appear in as many of your fans’ News Feeds as possible? Here’s a hypothetical story to give you some ideas.

Meet Joe. Joe is an independent filmmaker who’s trying to create some buzz around his latest documentary about french fries. He’s got over 1,500 fans, but he hasn’t posted anything in a while, so he suspects he might have dropped off the News Feed for many of them. He decides not to immediately jump into promoting his french fry film. First, he sets out to increase his Affinity score. He starts a few controversial surveys on his page and encourages readers to comment. All those comments increase his page’s Weight and hence his Facebook PageRank. He asks a few direct questions of his fans to start conversations, which also bump up his Affinity score. Then he starts posting still pictures from his new documentary, and since photos have higher Facebook EdgeRank, his weight score goes up again. Only after working on improving his score with his fans for a couple of weeks is he ready to release the trailer for his movie. If he didn’t put in the extra time to build his Affinity and Weight and hence his Facebook PageRank, his movie trailer wouldn’t have reached nearly as many people.

What is Facebook GraphRank?

Now that you understand Facebook EdgeRank, let’s take a brief look at GraphRank. GraphRank is a subset of Facebook EdgeRank that targets mainly Facebook app developers. In essence, GraphRank is designed to help Facebook users find apps that have been a hit with their friends. The more their friends appreciate a certain app, the more prominently that app will display in their News Feed.

GraphRank is good at determining whose opinion you are most likely to listen to. For example, your college roommate’s opinion from 1990 is going to have less weight than your best friend’s opinion, with whom you interact on Facebook every day. As your relationships with your Facebook friends change, what GraphRank displays will also change.

The GraphRank formula is different (but not much) from the Facebook EdgeRank formula. GraphRank takes into account Affinity, Weight, Interactions, and Time Decay. The Affinity score in this case is based not only on how much two users interact, but also how many common interests they have together.

Many of the same tips for increasing Facebook EdgeRank will help you to improve your GraphRank. For example, releasing your app at the right time is of critical importance to get people to pick it up right away. If you’re marketing an app to a bunch of night owls and you release your app at seven in the morning on a Sunday, this will not help you increase your GraphRank. Don’t just make an app and expect people to find it on their own. Now that GraphRank is around, that’s going to happen even less frequently than it did before.

An important distinction between Facebook EdgeRank and GraphRank

GraphRank only applies to apps. Pages are still ruled by Facebook EdgeRank. Therefore, unless you are an app developer, GraphRank is not something you need to be concerned about. Instead, focus your marketing muscle on improving your Facebook EdgeRank by reviewing and implementing the tips listed above.