EdgeRank Unveiled

Introduction

Did you know that no matter how many fans you have on Facebook, your branded messages are only reaching a fraction of them at any given time? The amount of users exposed to your branded content is dependent on a Facebook-created algorithm called EdgeRank. Your brand, and its public posts, are graded with an ever-changing EdgeRank score, and that score determines how far each message goes and how many users it reaches.

Comscore found that Facebook users spend approximately one quarter of their time on the network interacting with their news feeds, so the obvious question is: How can you maximize the amount of

fans you reach and engage with branded

newsfeed updates? Wildfire paired up with the experts at EdgeRank Checker to analyze over 60,000 brand pages and 1M posts, and separated the data by industry vertical. This report will analyze the best performing content by vertical, and provide tips for improving your EdgeRank score based on the trends we uncovered.

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/The_Power_of_Like_How_Brands_Reach_and_Influence_Fans_Through_Social_Media_Marketing

http://www.wildfireapp.com

http://edgerankchecker.com/

News Feed on Facebook: More to the Story ................................................ 3

The Study .....................................................................................................................4

What Was Studied? ........................................................................................................4

Engagement By Content Type ..................................................................................5

Best/Worst Description Lengths by Content Type for all Categories ........ 7

Industry Categories on Facebook ............................................................................9

Engagement Data by Category ........................................................................ 10

Brand or Product ........................................................................................................... 10

Local Business .................................................................................................................12

Company, Organization, or Institution .................................................................. 14

Cause or Community ................................................................................................... 16

Artist, Band or Public Figure .................................................................................... 18

Entertainment ................................................................................................................ 20

3rd Party Apps .........................................................................................................21

Conclusion .................................................................................................................22

PAGE 2 | EdgeRank Unveiled: The Three Keys to Improving Facebook Reach and Engagement


News Feed on Facebook: More to the StoryMany businesses are rushing to build their Facebook fanbases, but what’s the value of a fan if you don’t know how to effectively get their attention?

The comScore study showed that, on average, 16% of a fan page’s fans are reached by branded content when a brand posts five out of seven days. To increase the reach of its branded content, a brand needs to focus on making its posts highly engaging, since this increases the likelihood that the content will appear in more users’ newsfeeds. To understand the relationship between engagement and reach on Facebook, we need to take a deeper look at the EdgeRank Algorithm.

EdgeRank is the algorithm Facebook uses to determine what you see in your newsfeed. The EdgeRank Algorithm, as defined by Jason Kincaid from the live f8 developer conference, is:

Every item that shows up in your News Feed is considered an Object. If you have an Object in the News Feed (say, a status update), whenever another user interacts with that Object they’re creating what Facebook calls an Edge, which includes actions like tags and comments.

Facebook does not disclose the details of the algorithm that determines EdgeRank, but it’s believed that it consists of three main factors:

1. First, there’s an affinity score between the viewing user and the item’s creator — if you send your college friend a lot of Facebook messages and check their profile often, then you’ll have a higher affinity score for that person than you would with the “friends” you added on Facebook but haven’t interacted with in months. Likewise, if a fan interacts with a brand by visiting its Facebook brand page or interacting with its posts, this will boost the affinity score between this brand and its fan.

2. Second, there’s a weight given to each type of Edge. While it has not been confirmed by Facebook, testing has shown that content types that take more time to engage with have higher weight. For example, a “Like” has less engagement weight than a comment, most likely because hitting the “Like” button is a much easier action for a user to decide to do, versus writing a comment. The same analogy applies to photos likely having more weight than just words.

3. And finally there’s the most logical factor — time. The older an Edge is, the less important it becomes.

When you understand how the scoring is done, you can see why having a high EdgeRank, or at least working to improve it over time, is the key to increasing the exposure of your page to Facebook users, driving more traffic to it, and continuously building out your community.

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/The_Power_of_Like_How_Brands_Reach_and_Influence_Fans_Through_Social_Media_Marketing

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/22/facebook-edgerank/


You are probably wondering several things: What kind of posts work? How often should I post? Where can I find all these rules? The answer is, there are no ‘one size fits all’ approach; each brand must tailor its strategy to fit the demographics, behaviors and interests of its fans and their friends.

The good news is that there are certain tactics that we’ve seen work again and again across many different brand pages. In this report, we will take a look at what sort of strategies work for messaging at the industry vertical level. We will use real life examples to illustrate messaging methods from companies that know how to engage their fans.

The StudyWhat Was Studied?

The study analyzed how categories, content type, and character length work together. We looked at over 60,000 Pages with over 1,000,000 Posts, looking at the six “macro” categories Facebook defines:

» Artist, Band or Public Figure

» Brand or Product

» Cause or Community

» Company, Organization or Institution

» Entertainment

» Local Business or Place.

EdgeRank is an algorithm that ranks objects in the Facebook News Feed. Pages with high EdgeRank Scores will be more likely to show up in the News Feed than Pages with low EdgeRank Scores.

EdgeRank is made up of 3 variables: Affinity, Weight, and Time Decay. While the variables are known, the algorithm changes daily and is not shared with the public. EdgeRank Checker has developed their own approximation of the EdgeRank algorithm to help Page Administrators understand how their Page interacts with the News Feed. Within this report, you will learn about engagement on Facebook with the understanding that increasing your engagement by employing messaging best practices will increase your EdgeRank score, which in turn will increase the reach of your brand’s messages. This, ultimately, is every brand marketer’s goal: to maximize reach on all networks.


Since EdgeRank is based on engagement activity — the more engaging your posts, the higher your EdgeRank, and vice versa — our study hinged on engagement statistics for brands, separated by industry. We define engagement as interactions with your content by fans: all the “Likes,” comments, and shares that result (or don’t result!) when your brand posts an update to the public.

For each of the 1MM+ posts that were analyzed, we looked at engagement statistics as defined by engagement activity/total reach per post. Both of those figures are available only at an admin-level to Fan Page administrators, and are shared by over 60,000 pages with EdgeRank Checker as part of its service.

The remainder of this report will focus on engagement statistics by content type: which content is most engaging to fans of different industry verticals? What are the best practices your brand should consider to include more of the engaging content in your messaging strategy? What types of messages will work best to be most engaging, and thus increase your EdgeRank with users? What follows is our analysis of these questions.

Engagement by Content Type

When comparing all 1MM+ posts across the 60,000 pages that we processed, we found that; photos are by far the most engaging piece of content.

Typically Photos are:

» Eye catching

» Heavier (in terms of weight assigned within EdgeRank)

» Easier to consume than other media content

Users don’t have to press “Play” and dedicate time to watching a video to try and ascertain whether it’s entertaining and they don’t have to click through a link to a new website or tab to see if it’s interesting when they get there. With a photo, users decide within a glance whether they’re interested or not— the high engagement results reflect this simplicity and ease of interaction.

We define engagement as interactions with your content by fans: all the “Likes,” comments, and shares that result (or don’t result!) when your brand posts an update to the public.

Photos are by far the most engaging piece of content.

FACT


Interestingly, the second most engaging content type is a status message— this result lends itself well to the same theory, of users reacting favorably to instantaneous (or at least very quick) interactions and decision making. With a status, since it’s just words, users know by the time they’ve finished reading the statement whether they’re going to interact with it, or let it pass. With all other content types (aside from photos) the user needs to decide whether he wants to invest the time to click, or watch, or investigate the URL. Asking users to spend this extra time pondering engagement is, on average, less successful than keeping things simple with instantaneously possible engagement decisions.

This is not to say that videos and links have no place in your messaging strategy. In this paper, we will also learn how best to frame videos and links to most appeal to users viewing these updates.


Best/Worst Description Lengths by Content Type for all Categories

We chose to study the effects of a written description paired with different content types: for example, is it better to write more when you’re describing a link you’re about to share, or less? We defined “Short” descriptions as those that have <140 characters, because that’s the character cut-off Twitter designed to keep content short, sweet, and to the point. “Medium” content descriptions are 141-280 characters, and “Long” content is greater than 281 characters.

It’s interesting to note that; all 5 content types showed the most engagement when the paired description had a minimum of 141 characters. In this case, Twitter-length posts are not as popular or engaging as longer posts on Facebook. This would also seem to imply that if cross posting to both Twitter and Facebook at the same time, it would decrease engagement on Facebook if you attempted to keep both character lengths below 140 characters.

All 5 content types showed the most engagement when the paired description had a minimum of 141 characters.

FACT

In order to be as engaging as possible, your brand should post two separate lines of content, for Twitter and Facebook separately, as longer Facebook posts won’t fit on Twitter, and Twitter-length posts won’t engage users as well on Facebook.

FACT


One way of understanding this involves giving users context, and a brief explanation of “why” they should look at the attached media. Additionally, the paired worded description is also a perfect place to insert a call-to-action (CTA), giving users a suggestion about what to do next.

More specifically, posting a video without pairing the update with a written description is a major no-no: these updates were the worst performers of the bunch, indicating that video is one format that users need context around in order to take the time to interact with it.

Releasing only a photo, or only a video, without taking the time to meaningfully caption it is always worse for engagement.

FACT

Posting a video without pairing the update with a written description is a major no-no.


Industry Categories on Facebook

Facebook defines 6 industry categories under the macro-level category options:

» Artist, Band, or Public Figure

» Brand or Product

» Cause or Community

» Company, Organization, or Institution

» Local Business or Place

» Entertainment

Facebook defines six industry verticals under the macro-level Fan Page category options.


We analyzed the success of each type of status update and separated the data by industry category. We wanted to see if there were differences in the types of content most engaging to users based on industry, or if content preferences would be more or less universal. And we did find some clear differences in what fans liked to engage with based on industry vertical category. For instance, we found that photos were wildly popular for engagement, especially for brands/products (a near 7.5% engagement percentage, versus less than 1% engagement for the next most engaging media, status updates).

Engagement Data by CategoryIn this section, we’ll break down the engagement data per content type by the 6 brand macro-categories that Facebook has sorted pages into at the top level. Additionally, we’ll take a look at the types of businesses that would self-select into each category, including best practices for messaging content for these businesses.

Brand or Product

Fan Pages on Facebook that identify as Brand or Product enjoy significantly higher than average en-gagement when posting photos, at over 7x higher interaction rates than the next closest engaging con-tent type, Status. Brand/Product Fan Pages on Face-book should consider weaving photos prominently into a messaging plan, including to support descriptions that would otherwise stand alone as Status updates.

Because brands and products seem to be inordinately popular when posting photos, one good method to integrate more photos into status updates is to consider how the brand can create “double-whammy” posts. A double whammy post is one that has more than one media type contained within it— for example, when posting an update about a new product release, consider creating the visual foundation for the update with a screenshot (photo) of the new release, but also make sure to include a link a site with more information about the news within the worded description.

Photos were wildly popular for engagement, especially for brands/products.

FACT


Whether a page posts a question, or a poll, or a timely update about a calendar holiday, the majority of status updates on the DD page are photo updates.

One brand that fully understands the high impact that photo updates have is Dunkin Donuts. Whether the page posts a question, poll, or a timely update about a calendar holiday, the majority of status updates on the DD page are photo updates.


Local Business

Local Businesses experience great engagement with photos and videos about the business. While the first instinct of many small business owners might be to play up their interactions to seem like a big brand, some of the most engaging posts are the ones that reveal the business in its true element. This could include pictures of the storefront decorated seasonally, updates including local activity (such as any well known city/town events), and pictures with “favorite” local customers.


Sprinkles Cupcakes makes sure to regularly include in-store promotions with their messaging to make the connection between social media activity and what’s going on inside each local business location. In this case, they’re following another best practice, posting about timely and relevant content (the national holiday) in addition to their promotion.

Another popular and engaging approach for local businesses is to create status updates tied to in-store specials, such as informing fans that the first 50 people to whisper “founding father” to the cashier that day would receive a free dark chocolate cupcake. Sprinkles Cupcakes, with over 300K fans (and many, many local shops) still does this with their messages several times a week!


Company, Organization, or Institution

Brands that self identify as companies, organizations, or institutions choose to represent the company/ organization/institution as the brand. This means that updates detailing organizational achievements and developments will be frequent, as well as behind-the-scenes information that exposes company workings, such as employee events and company traditions. As is typical, photos were the most popular content type. Interestingly, videos and status updates are very similar in engagement rates, indicating a wide versatility in the types of status updates that these brands can expect to be engaging for their audiences. While links happen to be the least popular, savvy brand managers can include links to outside articles, releases, and updates as part of other content updates, employing the same “double-whammy” technique to increase engagement rates.


Just in time for Halloween, Levi’s gives fans a glimpse of real employees in festive costumes.

Successful organizations wishing to represent the essence of the company to its fan audience see a lot of success especially when posting content that “humanizes” the brand. Showing a company’s behind-the-scenes activity, or profiles of real employees, in photos and videos, helps to emotionally connect users to a brand. For fan pages of this category, one best practice is never to miss an opportunity to share company-internal initiatives such as Hackathons, corporate social responsibility initiatives, employee traditions, and internal fun stuff (like Levi’s does, below!).


Cause or Community

The Cause or Community vertical is particularly successful in engagement around photos and videos. The remaining content type statistics indicate that links might perform better if they are paired with photos (as part of the description) than they do as their own updates.

Since Causes and Communities are typically followed by users at least marginally impassioned about the underlying cause of the page, we can typically expect that updates relating to progress in society or specific people involved with the cause are very popular. Supporting a cause usually goes hand in hand with helping to spread the word about it, so crafting status updates that incentivize sharing is a successful strategy.


For example, some status update ideas that resonate with Cause/Community pages are:

Weekly survivor/tribute/warrior stories: pages for disease awareness organizations succeed at uniting users around other real users (or their friends, children, and family.)

Asking users to submit photos of their friends/family involved in the cause with written descriptions of their story.

Updates about latest legislation or news-making changes involving the community serve to rally users around important updates that apply to their interests.

The Breast Cancer Site regularly encourages engagement with multi-content type messages, like this one which has a photo paired with a call-to-action and a link.


Artist, Band or Public FigureBrands that identify as Artists, Bands, or Public enjoy solid engagement rates with photos followed by status updates. A close third is videos, which makes sense since all three entities typically have very visual representations.

Some ways an artist, band, or public figure can consider beefing up their messaging strategy with engaging content is to:

Take a series of before/after photos chronicling their transformation after getting hair/makeup done and writing a description of the process (photo)

Asking fans which song/movie/episode/scene was a favorite – make this more timely by calling out specific albums/episodes

When posting a link that goes to another website, use a photo of a destination within that website to help serve as teaser content (show fans what they’ll see when they click through)


Below is one example of a best practice for posting photos that actually serve as clever advertising for the link within the description. President Bill Clinton employs this method on his fan page regularly: in addition to healthy descriptions that end in a link to an outside website, Clinton always pairs the content with a relevant photo, to catch viewers attention and attract eyeballs to the post.

Administrators for Bill Clinton’s Facebook Fan Page regularly post photo updates with lengthy descriptions, allowing readers a contextual background for the former President’s activity in addition to a visual stimulus.


Entertainment

The outlier in this industry overview turned out to be Entertainment. The most successfully engaging posts by brands in the Entertainment vertical are status updates. One hypothesis as to why this might be true — for actors, singers, and musicians— is that where Entertainment is the job of the brand (or person(s) represented by the brand), fans are used to seeing photos and videos, but not as used to seeing an Entertainer’s personally written updates. Status updates are novel and intriguing to an audience that is used to visually connecting with a performer or entertainer.

Some entertainers appeal to their Facebook fan audience by treating them as though they’re the entertainers’ VIPs. Ask your fans their opinions on the latest single, or album. Release a snippet of new lyrics, or an idea for a movie plot and ask their thoughts. Soliciting opinions shows fans that not only is the fan page attended to by administrators, but that it’s a 2-way conversation between the entertainer and fans. If the fan page is for an entertainment product, such as a specific movie or sitcom, the same principle of treating fans like VIPs applies— share snippets of video and ask what moment fans thought was funniest, or a photo-still of the winning shot and ask them to caption it. Bringing fans in to the experience of creating that entertainment makes them feel like “insiders,” and spurs interaction.


Lady Gaga interacts with fans on a personal level, sharing her intimate thoughts about a night at the Grammies and wishing her fans a Happy Valentine’s Day.

3rd Party AppsAre you wondering about posting to Facebook using an app and if that changes anything? We thought you might be...

3rd party applications can be used to post content to Facebook without actually being on Facebook to do it. These include free and paid applications like Hootsuite, Spredfast, and even Wildfire Messenger. One common question that comes up around using an app to post to Facebook (instead of doing it from the network itself) is whether the app post will get the same exposure and the same reach as the post coming from inside Facebook.

EdgeRank Checker has done extensive testing to see whether posts released to Facebook from a 3rd party app saw any difference in reach or impressions versus posts released through Facebook. When the first studies unearthed a difference, Facebook immediately updated posting processes fixing the imbalance. At the current time, there is no difference between the reach and exposure of posts published through Facebook or 3rd party apps. What about engagement rates? If the reach is the same, there should be no significant difference in engagement rates of 3rd part app postings. The bottom line is: follow best practices regarding posting content, and the vehicle for posting it won’t matter.


ConclusionThe amount of reach your brand has on Facebook is limited by a constantly-updating algorithmic score called EdgeRank. EdgeRank is an engagement score, giving credit (and impressions) to brands that successfully engage with fans, and lessening the reach of brands that don’t. While the algorithm itself is unknown to the public and is constantly changing, we can approximate directional EdgeRank changes by understanding engagement as it happens.

When Wildfire teamed up with EdgeRank Checker to understand engagement scores by industry category, we were looking to educate brands on how best to create consistently engaging messages on Facebook. What we found was that certain types of updates were more popular than others, and sparked more engagement activity. The three key take-aways we want you to keep in mind when approaching your brand’s messaging strategy are:

1. sprinkle photos (the most consistently engaging content type for five out of six industries) generously into your editorial plans.

2. always pair your media-containing updates with a written description as well— data reveals that users appreciate and interact more with updates that include written context, or a written call-to-action, not just a photo, video, or link.

3. craft different content for Facebook vs. Twitter. In all cases, the best performing messages contained greater than 140 characters (the maximum message length for Twitter)

Now that you know what sorts of content types perform most consistently for your industry, the next area of exploration is the actual content. Stay in touch with Wildfire as we release more white papers about best practices for engaging messaging.

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Documents

EdgeRank Unveiled