facebook Edgerank What it is and how to calculate

There are lots of new changes and updates happening on Facebook product team. Facebook Edgerank is one among that and for a facebook marketer that’s really important. I would relate the Facebook edgerank to the SEO pagerank when Google started disclosing how they rank pages in their  search results. For Facebook marketers, its equally important to know how Facebook ranks their updates on your followers wall, especially the under the ‘top news’ tab in everybody News feed.

What is Facebook edgerank ?

Firstly I would like to differentiate between ‘top news’ and ‘Most recent ‘in Facebook news feed because the understanding is required to understand edge rank score. Facebook recently introduced ‘Top news’ tab in your Facebook wall , which list the most relevant updates for you (that Facebook feels based on your facebook usage data and interactions) , that they feel is the most interesting for you to know. The ‘Most recent’ will just list the latest updates from all of your friends updates and postings. The ‘Top News’ tab is selected by default when a user logins to their account and that really make it an important aspect of Facebook marketing for marketers.  And also it’s found that 50% of Facebook users check only ‘Top news’ and don’t know that ‘Most recent’ exist. The Facebook edgerank algorithm is the decision maker to decide which ones of your recent updates are required to be added under ‘top news’ on your friends news feed.

How is Facebook EdgeRank calculated?

The mathematical formula released by Facebook is

Facebook Edgerank = Affinity score * Weight * Time Decay

The Affinity score is a calculation for the affinity between the user and the creator of the item. Some of the measures that can help calculate the affinity are:

• The messages being exchanged between a user and the creator of the item.
• Number of times the  users profile was checked

The Weight is the type of the interaction between the Facebook users.  The following are some of the interactions which can considered when calculating weight (listed in the order of importance) :

• A tag on a picture
• Comments
• Likes

The last and most obvious one is the Time. The older the post or update, the lower the time decay number.

So looking at each factor, all comes back to the most important factor in Social media marketing: User Engagement. The higher your engagement with your friends or fans, the higher will be your edgerank with a user. And the higher your edgerank score with a user, the higher is the chance of your update to get listed in the users ‘Top news’.

The pictorial representation of the Facebook edgerank is

Please checkout a related article on Facebook edgerank checker

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I am an web marketing specialist, specializing on enterprise SEO, Web Analytics, product management / marketing, and web development. I also manage SEO for a large web company headquartered at New York city. Circle me on Google +.

Ratish Naroor

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