Five tips to get your Facebook posts seen in Newsfeeds

If you are a regular Facebook user you will know that when you log onto the site your newsfeed will show the TOP NEWS for you, but you can switch it to MOST RECENT.  For example, this morning I had 239 posts in my most recent, which are posts that have accumulated overnight. When I clicked on MOST RECENT I didn’t see all 239 posts, but instead saw the last 20, but of course I could have scrolled down and seen the rest….

How Facebook decides which posts appear in TOP NEWS is down to their Edgerank formula. This Edgerank formula looks at three things to determine if your page posts will appear in TOP NEWS for each LIKER:

• Affinity: How often that page LIKER interacts with your page, eg. liking a post, commenting on a post, commenting on the wall, etc.
• Weight: Different types of content you post on your page.
• Time: Facebook are trying to balance showing recent data without just having a chronological list.

So now I have thoroughly confused you, how can you easily improve your Edgerank score? First up, if you want to know what your current page score is you can check it on the Edgerank checker site. Below are what works…

• Comments score a higher weight than LIKES on a post, I think this is pretty obvious why – it requires more work!
• Photo and video posts score higher than just text or links.
• Link posts score higher than just text.
• If you use Facebook questions every time someone votes it increases your pages affinity score.
• If you post lots of items close together they are unlikely to all appear in one newsfeed.
• If the friends (who LIKE your page) of person X who also LIKES your page interact on the page it has a bigger chance of showing up in person X’s newsfeed.

If you want more details on this read this white paper by Awareness Inc.

What should you do now?

• Encourage people to comment on your posts, that means ask questions that are easy to respond to.
• Use the Facebook Questions feature.
• Include photos and video (this is video you upload onto the page, a YouTube video is a link) in your posts.
• Don’t post lots of posts close together.
• Monitor your posts to find the best time of day to post.

Really everything that I have talked about here is what you should be doing anyway, and I have to say that I LIKE that Facebook rewards pages who are doing the right thing. What do you think? Is this for the too hard basket?

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks, mobile phone socks www.MyMocks.com, founder of Social Rabbit – your guide in the world of social media www.Facebook.com/SocialRabbit and author of ‘Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business’. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.