What is edge rank?

I know this might not be really news but as a marketer I had to figure out how Facebook news feeds are working. I was the first rime confronted with edge rank last year and it is now an important part of FB marketing for us.
And then I saw the news that FB will allow comments on ads an I was wondering what benefit FB could have. Edge Rank came again in my mind.
Usually we pay for ads either for click or per view. Now if FB is going to apply edge rank to ads the whole advertising model will be rewritten. Edge rank would not be based on just branding or just clicks it would make your ad more expensive when people interact with the ad, because we will know if the banner or ad is successful. Click rates are down and paying per views don't give us really an indicator how successful the display ad is, but FB new method which allows comments to ads will give much better metrics. With edge rank your ad might be displayed more often because the consumer did interact.

So what is edge rank? Edge rank is the part of a formula that Facebook has released which lets us know how to get onto people’s newsfeed.
Facebook considers an item in your newsfeed as an Object. Whenever someone interacts with this object they are creating an ‘edge’ e.g. comment on the object, like the object etc. Facebook is trying to figure out what pieces of content is most interesting to me. If people are interacting with content then it’s probably more interesting so it will take that into account.
If this piece of content is from a friend that you interact a lot with on Facebook then that’s probably going to be more interesting.
Finally when this content is old it’s not as interesting as new content.

This means the key for getting a higher edge rank and therefore more on top of news is to have news with interactions as much as possible.

Getting people to comment on the news or to like the news is the key. Good examples are Lady Gaga and Walmart.

As brands come to understand Facebook more, they learn how to optimize posts to make them more “likeable”, or worthy of clicking like. There are many ways to do this, but the method that is by far the most mysterious to brands is the often misunderstood News Feed.

Currently on Facebook, when you log in as a user, you are brought to a home page that has your Top News Feed. The Top News Feed is a stream of information from your social connections (Facebook Friends, Groups you’ve joined, and Pages that you’ve “liked”) that Facebook thinks is most important to you. It’s not every piece of information being posted by every one of your friends. You have access to that, of course, through the “Recent News” feed—but the default for users who log into Facebook is the “Top News” in their News Feed.

If you’re a smart marketer, the first thing you’ll want to know is how to get into your target users Top News Feed. Here’s a graphic from the presentation given by Facebook.




Basically as a marketer you need not only to know how to do SEO for search engines but as well ERO (edge rank optimization).

TechCrunch has a good article about Edge Rank.

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