How to Become a Top Story on the New Facebook

The new Facebook rewards the level of engagement between you and your fans. The more engagement, the better the chances your posts will be more prominently featured as a Top Story – kind of like the front page on a newspaper or top listing in Google.

Many companies spend a lot of effort increasing the number of fans or “likes” on their Facebook pages, and they measure their social media effectiveness based on these numbers. It’s good to get more people liking your pages, but the truth is the new Facebook doesn’t really care how many fans you have. What matters are three things: the popularity of your post (affinity), its relevancy (weight) and its timeliness (time decay). These three factors are the “edges” that Facebook’s algorithm “ranks” to determine what content is likely to be most interesting to your audience.

Let’s take a closer look at these factors that make up your EdgeRank:

• Affinity is the score between the viewer and the ‘edge’ creator. How closely you are tied to the person creating the content determines this score.
• Weight is the value given to the comments and actions any given post receives from your Facebook community. As they “like” it, comment on it, tag it, it gains in relevance to the community at large.
• Time Decay is just that, the decaying value of the content as time passes. Today’s news is news. Yesterday’s news is history.

Gaining a high EdgeRank is contingent on creating the type of content that gets people to click on it in one way or another and to do so consistently. Here are some tips on how to create engaging content.

Tips For Increasing Facebook Content Engagement

1. Start a discussion - Just posting what you are up to doesn’t encourage any interaction. Sure, it lets your fans know what you are doing, but there is no reason for them to interact. Write posts that end with ‘what do you think?’ or ‘do you agree?’ questions.  Then make sure to monitor that discussion and, when appropriate, feed the discussion with comments of your own.

2. Videos - The beauty of putting a video as a post is that it begs for people to click on it. But be sure to keep it short. People are willing to watch a short video to its end, but unless it’s riveting, they will stop watching after a couple minutes.

3. Photographs - An interesting photo always gets a reaction. You may also try adding a caption that positions the photo in a way that adds to the viewing experience.

4. Call-to-Action - Sometimes you want your post to make people take action such as ‘Read this ebook’ or ‘Check out this article.’ Creating a post with links to things that are of interest to your fans is a good thing to do. If they are interested they will click on the link and that causes interaction, and interaction is good on the new Facebook.

5. Don’t oversell or undersell - No one likes a never-ending sales pitch.  By the same token, make sure you do highlight your wares from time-to-time.  Use the 80-20 rule for content/connection posts (80%) vs. sales messages (20%).  And when you do have a sales message, make sure there is a clear call-to-action.

There is a lot more you can do to make the most out of marketing on Facebook. We’ve just published a new eBook “How to Master Facebook Marketing in 10 Days,” and in this you’ll get practical tips on how you can substantially improve the metrics that matter in terms of your inbound marketing campaigns centered around Facebook.

How is your EdgeRank? Are your posts Top Stories? Let us know how you did it.

Image credit: DeweyDefeatsTruman.com

Comments

Posted by Jeanne Hopkins on Mon, Oct 24, 2011 @ 04:00 PM