Wednesday Words: Edge Rank

Last week we talked about algorithms used by social media sites to figure out how many of your users see what percentage of your posts and briefly mentioned Edge Rank and how that was Facebook's way of determining not only who sees content from your pages, but how many friends see what you post.

This week, we'll talk a bit more about Edge Rank and how it affects you and your profile and your page(s). Important note: Facebook has discontinued using "Edge Rank" but several of the things involved with pages and profiles still use the terms found within Edge Rank, thus the article on it.

Pages and profiles that have more engagement (likes, comments, shares, etc.) will appear more often and more permanently in feeds that have the page liked than pages and profiles which have less engagement.  Most articles agree that there seem to be three factors that way into the Edge Rank algorithm: Affinity, Weight and Time Decay.

Affinity is based on how friendly you (or your page are).  Or, to better define it, how much your friends/users "like" you.  The more you interact with your friend(s) or page(s), the more often the friend's (or page's) posts will appear in your news feed.  And vice versa.  For pages, interacting with your users and encouraging interaction and engagement is a necessity.  Remember, engagement can be as simple as "liking" something a friend or page posts, or liking comments on your page.

Weight, according to my sources below, is the likelyhood of something being shared.  They mention links, photos and videos being among things that have more weight and are seen more in wall feeds,  but I have noticed lately that links are among the lowest number of things seen by our users.  Posts without links and posts without images that are short and ask a question seem to have more weight than images or links.   So it's very possible that, once again, the algorithms have changed.

Time decay refers to the likelyhood of people seeing older posts when newer posts are available for them to see.  The older a post is, the less likely it is for someone to see it.

Several sites, including my last source linked below, believe that Edge Rank is dead and cite the fact that Facebook hasn't used the term in some time as well as recent interviews with Facebook that discuss how news feed items appear.

Even if it is true, they do acknowledge that the three factors (affinity, weight and time decay) still play factors in whatever ranking system Facebook is using.  Which means knowing and understanding the terms used with Edge Ranks is still valuable to working with your page.

For more information, check out the links below under sources.

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media.  These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media.   You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.

Sources: 

1. Why Your Facebook Page Gets Little Traffic: http://www.businessdirect.com/why-your-facebook-page-gets-little-traffic-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/
2. What is Edge Rank? http://www.whatisedgerank.com/
3. EdgeRank: http://edgerank.net/
4. EdgeRank is Dead: http://marketingland.com/edgerank-is-dead-facebooks-news-feed-algorithm-now-has-close-to-100k-weight-factors-55908