Today we are going to talk about how to improve your performance on Facebook. If you didn’t know all of your posts that you make on Facebook do not show up in the News Feeds of every one of your fans. This news flash can come to a shock to many and even piss a few off. For example Mark Cuban (Dallas Maverick’s owner) or George Takei (Star Trek Star). Mark Cuban is very angry with Facebook because he doesn’t get publicity for free anymore. Businesses have to pay to reach the fans that have already liked their page. Below is the Tweet and screen shot that Mark Cuban shared out to his twitter fans when he realized he would have to pay $3,000 to reach a million fans.
I mean honestly I think Cuban is overreacting a bit. When I went about researching Cuban I noticed that he gets mad at a lot of people. Facebook just ticked him off at the wrong time but I don’t think he has a valid excuse to be angry. Facebook is a free source for the basic social media platform but they can’t be a charity and need to make money some how. Businesses pay for advertisements everywhere else so why shouldn’t they have to pay for it on Facebook. If branded pages were given free rein on Facebook to push as much advertisement as they wanted for free to every user, then the users are going to get fed up. We don’t use Facebook to get blasted with advertisements and I believe Facebook is just trying to protect the life of the site and the loyalty of their users.
Now your probably wondering how Facebook goes about choosing what is placed in people’s News Feed and what isn’t. Understanding this concept is going to help improve your Facebook performance. Facebook uses this algorithm that they call EdgeRank.
You may read some articles that state it isn’t called EdgeRank and there are hundreds of new factors that affect whether your post is shown or not, but I am just going to give you the most important basics. If you would like to read more about the changes please follow this link: EdgeRank is Dead.
As you can see in the picture above, there are three very important factors that you should focus on.
Affinity: This is your relationship with users. The amount of users that have interacted with your page in the past affects how likely they are to see your posts. If they’ve clicked, liked, or even commented on your posts in the past, EdgeRank assumes that they are pretty interested in what you have to say, which gives it higher priority to show in that user’s News Feed.
Weight: This is how much priority EdgeRank gives to your post, based on the post type. Facebook has a hierarchy of post types, which photos and videos take top priority. Links come in as a second priority and your plain text status are at the very bottom. Interactions with other users , like comments, are more weighty than likes.
Time Decay: This is how old your post is. The longer your post is on Facebook, the less likely it will show up in a user’s News Feed. Your post is going to be more relevant to users who check Facebook constantly versus Facebook users who only check it once or twice a week because of this time decay aspect.
Now there are four things that EdgeRank checks every time you post and you should make sure to take this into consideration when trying to improve your Facebook performance.
User’s past interactions with the author
The more you engage with a friend or a page, the more likely you are to see their posts.
User’s past interactions with that post type
If you often engage with a certain type of post you’re more likely to see posts of that type.
Reactions from users who already saw the post
The more Facebook users engage with a post, the more likely you are to see that post.
Amount of complaints or negative feedback
As more users give negative feedback, the less likely you are to see that post.
Now that you are aware of the basics I am going to talk about the 5 most important things you need to do to get into the News Feed of your users.
Post Regularly
I have heard and read many conflicting data that states when the best day is to post on Facebook. This is honestly something you need to experiment and play with. Try Google Analytics to study your data. The picture above shows that the end of the week is best time, but once again it depends on your users and business. What I do know is that you should post regularly and mix it up. You want to make sure that your new posts are replacing the old posts.
Post photos
In this society people don’t like to read very much, or at least that is what I have noticed in my experience. Photos are self-explanatory and gain more engagement. Videos are also a great way to bring engagement in and are more interesting than text updates. Images tell a story and the best ones are the ones that people don’t have to wonder and question about.
Encourage Engagement
Ask questions, create contests, have fill-in-the-blank statements. Do whatever you can do to gain the attention of your users and make them want to participate. This will bump up your affinity score with the users and will give your future posts a higher chance of reaching their News Feeds.
Keep it clean
No profanity. Complaints about your Facebook posts will harm you way more than you think. There have been many of times that I have unliked, even complained about a page because of profanity on their site. Make sure to watch for spam so that you can avoid negative feedback.
Focus on quality
This is not what you want! Quality posts are the most important thing you can do to improve your Facebook performance. Make sure you are consistent as well because you are more likely to receive engagement that will push your posts into the News Feeds on a regular basis. People realize when you are not spending time on your posts and they will punish you for that.
Of course there are many others things you can do to improve your Facebook performance but if your boss asked you to improve your Facebook performance in one month, then focus on the five factors above and keep in mind the factors that EdgeRank looks for. This will help boost your performance and then you can begin focusing on other aspects.