Understanding and manipulating Facebook EdgeRank to dominate news feeds!

• We have several hundred Facebook subscribers to our business page and we update the page regularly with new content. However, we seldom receive comments or even "thumbs up" on what we post. Can you help us better optimize our future efforts to best engage our audience and get them interested in the conversation?

Answer: This is a great question and considering the recent changes to Facebook a timely one as well. For your business page to succeed it is important for you to understand how Facebook serves content to users and how you can optimize accordingly.

The average user of Facebook has 130 friends. These same users also like, follow, and interact with 80 different pages, groups, and events. If every single update, action, or conversation from all these friends and page likes showed up in your daily feed the final product would be overwhelming.

Enter Facebook EdgeRank.

EdgeRank is Facebook's algorithm. It decides which of your friends and page likes are featured in your news feed on a daily basis. If your business page is popular with certain users it is awarded a higher EdgeRank score, meaning it gets featured more in their feeds.

In contrast, if your published page content is not as popular with other users, it's labeled with a lower EdgeRank value and dropped from user feeds completely - clearly not a positive benefit if you are looking to drive more comments, thumbs up ratings, or views from your existing fans.

EdgeRank is made up of three different components: affinity, weight, and time decay.