19 Jun 2012 No Comments

How EdgeRank is affecting what your Facebook audience views

 

Managing your nonprofit’s Facebook Fan Page can be quite the task. From posts, cover photos, to community engagement, it almost feels like a full time job. You may feel that your hard work isn’t getting the attention from your nonprofit’s community it deserves. This may be because your Fan Page has not considered EdgeRank. Here’s a brief overview of Facebook EdgeRank and what you can do to increase your effectiveness. 

What’s Facebook EdgeRank?

EdgeRank is Facebook’s way of determining what your audience will find “interesting.” You may have noticed through your personal Facebook use that not all of your friend’s statuses show up in your news feed. This is because Facebook, through your activity, has deemed them “uninteresting” to you. The same situation can applied for Facebook Fan Pages.

This means that not all of your fans end up seeing your nonprofit’s Facebook posts. Depending on when you post and your fan engagement, roughly 10% of your fans will ever get to see your Facebook activity.

What does my nonprofit have to benefit from increasing its EdgeRank?

Simply put, the better your EdgeRank, the more of your fan base will see your Facebook activity. The more people, the more engagement, which you are ultimately looking to get our of your social media community.

“What can we do to improve our EdgeRank?”

As a quick analogy, think of increasing your Facebook EdgeRank as social SEO (search engine optimization). Right now, we’re going to outline some quick and practical ways to increase your nonprofit’s Facebook EdgeRank.

First you’ll have to master Facebook’s media hierarchy. When it comes to posting on Facebook, certain media types (i.e. videos, pictures, questions, etc.) are weighted more than others.

Facebook weighs activity metrics in the following order, from highest to lowest:

Community engagement: 

  1. Shares
  2. Comments
  3. Likes
  4. Clicks

 

Shared media:

  1. Videos
  2. Photos
  3. Status Updates
  4. Links

 

As a result, your nonprofit should aim for as many shares and comments as possible, which can be a direct result of posting more videos and photos. With more shares and comments on your Facebook Fan page, the higher your EdgeRank will be, meaning more people will view your content and engage with your organization on social media. Videos and photos are also weighed more than status updates and links. If possible, try to post more photos and videos from your nonprofit account as possible.

Facebook weighs content and action this way because of the “effort” it takes to do the certain actions. Which makes sense, commenting on a status requires more effort than simply “liking” it. Posting a video is more time consuming than sharing a link.

Examples

Notice how open-ended statuses can attracted a lot of comments. Comments help increase EdgeRank.

Images are viral enablers. See how often this image were shared on our Fan Page? That’s a double whammy – an image (media) and the shares (engagement). Images are EdgeRank gold!

Now you should be well on your way to increasing your nonprofit’s EdgeRank!

 

Now that you’ve got some science under your belt, download our free webinar, “Best Practices in Social Media Fundraising.” 

 

Photo Courtesy andreasivarsson 2012 

by Dan Fonseca in Nonprofit Resources, Social Media Fundraising Tags: , ,