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View Full Version : Do Your Facebook Fabs See Your Posts?



vangogh
12-07-2012, 07:31 PM
Something I'm not sure if everyone realizes is just because you update your Facebook page, there's no guarantee all your fans will see it. Not because they aren't paying attention, but because Facebook might not show them your update. Given how many people are on Facebook and posting new content, Facebook has to do similar things as search engines do with their results pages. They need to algorithmically determine what content to show where and when.

An article I found on CopyBlogger, The State of Facebook: What’s Working Now (http://www.copyblogger.com/state-of-facebook-marketing/), looks at how Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm works. You can read the article for the details, but the algorithm basically has 3 components.


Affinity - a measure of how often a person has interacted with another person’s or Page’s content in the past.
Weight - a measure of how many comments, Likes, and Shares a post is getting
Decay - a measure of how old the post is



The post then talks about PTAT (People Talking About This Number). There are a number of things that can go into PTAT and all help raise affinity. If you take the PTAT number and divide it by the number of fans you have, you can get a measure of engagement and compare it to other pages. The PTAT is publicly visible on pages.

For example the Nike Football page shows 14,980,463 likes · 208,823 talking about this. If you do the math

(208,823 / 14,980,643) * 100 = 1.39%

Compare it to the page for the NFL which has 6,461,784 likes · 198,763

(198,763 / 3,461,784) * 100 = 3.08%

The article suggests a good rate is about 2%

There's more in the article like suggestions for improving all this stuff that you can. I thought I'd point out some of this algorithmic stuff for anyone who didn't know or is just interested.