I’ve seen a couple people post a message that basically says, “Copy this is you’re reading my status updates, so I can see who’s really paying attention to me.”
I’ve also seen people disturbed that more people don’t respond to their updates.
I thought I’d post this note on Facebook to clarify some things. After I posted it for my friends there, I realized it might help others so I decided to blog about it.
First, here is the little-known Facebook NewsFeed fact:
No one sees every one of their friends updates. Facebook has a algorithm that decides what ones to show – especially for people who have hundreds of friends.
Shocked?
You shouldn’t be. It makes sense.
In an article called, “EdgeRank: The Secret Sauce That Makes Facebook’s News Feed Tick” http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/22/facebook-edgerank/
It says, “You may not realize it, but News Feed only displays a subset of the stories generated by your friends — if it displayed everything, there’s a good chance you’d be overwhelmed.”
Then it says what you see is based on what they call “Edgerank“. Edgerank is based on 3 components to determine who you see:
“1. there’s an affinity score between the viewing user and the item’s creator — if you send your friend a lot of Facebook messages and check their profile often, then you’ll have a higher affinity score for that user than you would, say, an old acquaintance you haven’t spoken to in years.
2. there’s a weight given to each type of Edge. A comment probably has more importance than a Like, for example.
3. And finally there’s the most obvious factor — time. The older an Edge is, the less important it becomes.”
That means…
If someone seems to get more people replying to their comments than yours and you want to know why.
Here are possible reasons:
1. He/she is on Facebook more times in the day and so other people are on when he/she posts her updates to see them. That gives him/her a higher momentary edgerank.
2. He/she replies to lots of people’s comments and pics so it gives him/her a higher “edgerank”. Again, that gives him/her a higher momentary edgerank.
3. He /she gets a lot of comments on their status updates and that moves it to the “Top News” feed, which gets more views and replies.
What does that mean if you want more people to reply and see your updates?
1. Be on Facebook a lot and update your status a lot.
2. Reply to a lot of people’s updates and pics.
3. Write updates that people want to comment on and reply to.
4. Respond and reply back when people comment on your updates.
Hope this clears things up! Obviously, if you do these things just to increase your ranking people will notice your stiff/fake replies and it will probably backfire.
Instead take these tips as an excuse to get more into Facebook and interact more. The more you do, the more response you’ll get!
If you think it’d help your friends, then feel free to “share” it with them. Hope you all have a great Christmas!
P.S. For a more detailed explanation, you should really read this whole article… “EdgeRank: The Secret Sauce That Makes Facebook’s News Feed Tick” http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/22/facebook-edgerank/
P.P.S. I have over 900 personal friends on Facebook, but only a few on my facebook page for this website. The reason is that I’ve only focused on Facebook as a fun tool to interact with friends. I have NOT used it as a marketing tool.
It wasn’t until recently that I created the facebook page for this site, because I realized I could I do it separately from my personal Facebook profile and not disturb my current “Facebook social world.”
But I still haven’t promoted this new Facebook page much (not smart, huh?).
If you would like to become my “friend” on Facebook, please don’t request it from my personal account. I only add real-life, face-to-face, friends. If you’d like to be “friends” on facebook, then please like this page.
I’m a business strategist, consultant, content creation specialist, and speaker. I’ve been studying effective marketing and business methods (both online and offline) since 1999.
===> If you would like to see ways that we could work together, then please click here to learn more.
