This is an article all about EdgeRank. How it helps you? Well, if you have a Facebook page for your business, understanding edge rank can help you reach out to even more people.

It’s a cold hard fact that when someone has liked your Facebook business page, they’ll rarely if at all ever go back to your timeline because your timeline is just showing all of your old posts and no one is interested in the old news; they are interested in what is happening here and now. When you post something, it gets seen through people’s news feeds. Because when people log into Facebook, they’ll immediately see their news feeds and find out what everybody is doing.

Now if let’s just say that the average number of friends is 150 people on Facebook so let’s just say that they’ve got 150 peoples posts that they’d like to be kept up to date with. Well, you couldn’t possibly read 150 posts every time you switch on Facebook, so Facebook needs to decide in what order and who’s posts should appear on which news feeds. How does it do that? With the help of Edgerank.

So understanding Edgerank will help you get your posts in as many people’s news feeds as possible.

1. The first thing that defines Edgerank is affinity. If you look up the dictionary, it’ll say something along the lines of having a natural attraction towards a thing, a person, an idea, etc. and it’s the same with Facebook. When you post something and people comment on that post, they are actually showing an affinity towards your brand, your presence on Facebook and Facebook will remember if you continually comment on peoples’ posts who engage with that person or that brand on Facebook. So, engaging posts are key; this is why people say engagement is really key. If you put a question on there with a 50-50 answer and people respond to it, what they are actually doing is showing an affinity to your Facebook presence and it will increase their edge rank score which is great for you. So engagement is key.

2. Another of those factors is weight. Whenever you post something on Facebook, Facebook sees that as an object and when an object gets likes and shares then itll increase the weight of that object and Facebook will push it into more and more peoples news feeds.

Think of it like this; it’s a Friday afternoon it’s 2 o’clock, and 500 likes later suddenly in your news feed pops up a picture featuring something cute. Right, it’s the classic cute little kitten picture! What happens here it’s gathered so much weight, it’s going viral in other words, it’s being pushed into more and more peoples’ news feeds. Why it has to be cats and kittens, I have no idea; it should be dinosaurs, but it sadly would never happen.

So what are we saying here? When you are posting, things don’t always look for the sale, try and mix things up a bit and get a bit of a viral success because it will give you greater exposure and help with your edge rank.

3. The final factor is decay regardless of what you post it will be affected by time; no one is interested in old news, remember. The only real way to combat that is to pay Facebook for a promoted post then time isn’t such a factor.

So, to recap, that’s the three different things that you have to remember:

• affinity (engaging posts)
• weight (get some viral success)
• time decay (the time you are posting things will effect your edge rank and your success on Facebook)