One of the big things that separates Facebook from the other social networks (such as Twitter and Google+) is a semi-secret algorithm known as “EdgeRank”.
You’ve probably noticed that on Facebook you don’t always see every post from every one of your friends. Facebook uses this special algorithm to determine which posts you should see and which ones you shouldn’t. It’s based largely upon how often you tend to interact with that user. For example, I leave comments on most of my wife’s posts, so Facebook tends to show me everything that she writes. If there is someone that you continually ignore on there, Facebook will begin to show you fewer and fewer of their posts.
EdgeRank has gotten a lot of discussion in the past few weeks now that Facebook has rolled out their “promoted posts” feature for Business Pages. Promoted posts are a way for Pages to pay a bit of money to get their post seen by more of their existing fans. If your Page has 400+ likes, you’re eligible to promote a post within approximately three days of posting it. If you see the word “promote” at the bottom of your post, as seen here, you can click on it to get started.
Tied to this, it seems that posts from Facebook Pages are being seen by a smaller percentage of users than normal. Perhaps it simply feels that way, or perhaps Facebook really is limiting them to try to get people to pay, but one way or another you need to get more people to see your stuff.
So how do you get your posts seen without paying for it?
There are two main things you can do to help get your posts seen by the widest possible audience:
- Get users to interact with them. Comments and “likes” on a post will help quite a bit in two areas:
- That post will slowly go out to more people as it becomes more popular.
- Those users that comment/like the post will be more likely to see your posts in the future.
- Post directly to Facebook; don’t automate your posting using a tool like HootSuite. While those tools are great and are certainly helpful in some cases, they hurt your EdgeRank and cause your post to be seen by fewer users.
At the end of the day it comes back to the same mantra we always preach — post great content. Great content on Facebook will tend to attract more interaction, which in turn will help it to be seen by more users.
