Why did Facebook develop EdgeRank?
Are you one of those brands spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on creating content for social media interactions? Facebook themselves admits the average brand page only reaches 16-17% of its fans. Data from PageLever shows that for brands with millions of fans, even less of their fans see the content. They estimate the content only reaches ~3% of their fans. Why is this so? It’s because of an algorithm, EdgeRank, that calculates what posts to filter out.
When Facebook allowed brands to have pages, brands began posting a lot of content. Facebook users felt there was too much content coming at them, almost so much that it felt like spam. As a result, Facebook created a filter that determines who sees particular posts. There are three parts to the filter.
The first part of the equation, affinity, takes into consideration how much time you spend interacting with certain friends, groups and pages. If you are spending a lot of time interacting with them, then your affinity will be stronger. The next piece of the puzzle is about weight. Weight is essentially the level of interaction a piece of content gets. For example how many likes and comments. And the last piece to the puzzle is time. Over time, a post’s relevance decays making it less important, pushing it down the feed.
What are the three big problems around content and engagement?
1. Creating great content so fans will want to interact with it
2. Creating a lot of that great content
3. Promoting the content
The truth is most brands don’t have the budget to create enough great content to be effective at engaging their customers. What makes matters worse, in addition to a content creation budget, you also need a promotion budget. And the cost to promote content can become prohibitive.
How much does it cost a brand to send a Sponsored Posts or Stories?
One sponsored story from Facebook costs $200
• Let’s say the brand posts 2 times per day
• $200 x 2 = $400/day
• 7 days/wk x $400/day = $2,800/wk
• 4 wks/mo x $2,800/wk = $11,200/mo
• 12 mo/yrs x $11,200 = $134,400/yr
• $134,400/ yr just to get your content seen!
And that doesn’t include the cost of the:
• Creative
• Content production
• Content delivery systems (like Buddymedia)
• Community managers
How Do I get EdgeRank to work in my favor and rise above my competitors in the cosmetic industry?
• EdgeRank gives greater exposure (reach) to posts that are more engaging
• Boring posts decrease your reach and thus your bottom line
• The solution is to create more interesting posts
What makes a better post in the cosmetic industry?
Here are some hints. It’s the ability to:
Benchmark engagement performance vs. your competitors in the cosmetic industry
Surface the best content and content types to engage your target audiences in the cosmetic industry
Determine how frequently to post
Calculate the best days of the week and hours in the day to post compared to cosmetic industry competitors
Know when to post the right type of content to get the highest engagement in the cosmetic industry
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