Unravellng the Mystery of Facebook’s Top News Feed

Ever wonder why people aren’t seeing your artful posts on Faceook?   According to this article in PR Daily, your

EdgeRank (or where your update lands on someone else’s feed)  is composed of the primary components of affinity, weight, and time.

• Affinity is determined by how often you check in with a certain friend or brand. This is a one-way street, though. You can’t directly influence someone’s affinity for your brand. You can, however, give them reasons to come back to your page.

• Weight pertains to how much importance a particular object is given. Photos and videos seem to be given the most weight, followed by links and status updates. “Likes” hold low weight. However, the most valuable factor in an object’s EdgeRank, according to TNW, is comments.

• Finally, timeliness factors in. Facebook’s EdgeRank will favor fresh content. This factor ensures that all content you see is current.

So… how do you get people to comment?   Here are some strategies that have worked for my clients…

• Ask quesetions in your updates — make it something simple — that people can answer with a yes or no.
• Write updates designed to stimulate conversation – write about current events or about situations that you have in common with your target audence.  Don’t just post status alerts and news (this is especially applicable to people with fan pages where there is a huge temptation to just re-post your blog content.
• Enable facebook comments on your blog — many themes, including OptimizePress, now offer this option. 

Michele Scism of Decisive Minds has a wonderful strategy for getting comments.  She conducts the Q&A for her weekly teleseminar series on Facebook.  If you want to see how this works, check out the facebook fan page strategy teleseminar she is holding today (if you happen upon this blog post later than today – you can listen to the recording — and see the interaction on her Decisive Minds Fan page wall.

What do you do to get people to engage on Facebook and keep retruning to your page?