Or, why having a large Facebook following is not enough…
You’ve spent months building up your social following on Facebook. You’ve run fan-gating promotions, optimized the images on your profile and even included social icons on all your marketing materials. Finally, you’ve reached your goal of 1,000 Facebook Fans! So what’s the problem? A little something we like to call EdgeRank.
Because there are over a billion users on Facebook, and the average user has over 100 friends, there is no way every post that is submitted can be displayed in one’s News Feed. Therefore, Facebook developed EdgeRank, a complex algorithm used to determine what content is displayed on News Feeds, in what order and to whom.
Basically (and I realize this may come as a shock to some of you), not all of your Facebook fans see your posts. In fact, only about 15% of them do. All that hard work for 1,000 fans and you can only reach to 150 of them?! It just doesn’t seem fair. You’re probably wondering what you can do about this. Unfortunately, there is no slaying the evil EdgeRank beast, but there are a few ways to boost your chances of being seen in News Feeds.
Be relevant and engaging. Although your Facebook fans enjoy your brand, they don’t want to hear about it all day, every day. It’s important that you create occasional posts just for fun. The goal here is to create something interesting and relevant to your audience which will spark engagement. Fill-in-the-blank statuses are great at doing this. For example, if you are a company reaching out to college students you could say something like: “My favorite thing about campus in the Fall is _______ .” You would be amazed at how many people feel the need to fill in a sentence like that! The more that people engage with your posts, the more valuable Facebook will deem it, and therefore the higher its EdgeRank will be.
Variety is the spice of life, and social media. Let’s face it, we live in a fast-paced visual world where people get distracted very easily. The goal of your Facebook page may be to gain readers for your blog, but if you are constantly posting text-heavy links to your content you will get overlooked. It’s important that you share a variety of content: videos, pictures, articles, quotes, etc. Show your audience that you’re a dynamic brand that has a lot to offer.
Beat them at their own game. If you plan on putting up a marketing message (and you want it to be seen by a large audience), then you’re going to have to play Facebook’s way. As consumers we are constantly being hit with marketing messages and we have become really good at blocking them out. If your audience thinks your post is telling them to open their wallets, they probably won’t hit the “like” button. So what happens to your post? It earns a low EdgeRank, gets swallowed up by Facebook and never sees the light of the News Feeds again. What’s my suggestion? Post something “cute and cuddly” in order to get your page’s affinity up, and then hit them with the hard sell. Essentially, you are tricking Facebook into thinking people really enjoy your content and want to see more of it.
Sure, it’s important that we continue to grow our audience size, but having a million fans is useless if our content never reaches them. Social Media is an ever-changing landscape whose future we can’t predict, but together we can achieve social success.
For more information on leveraging social media, visit this article by Daniel Kushner.
About the Author: Rachel Testa is a Kentucky native and a recent addition to the Weaving Influence team. She has a background in social media management and is passionate about the promotional process. When she’s not chasing the latest digital marketing trend, she enjoys reading, painting and spending time in nature.
photo credit: infocux Technologies