Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to hang out with an assortment of highly successful facebook page owners and administrators. The include the manager of a popular band, two Fortune 500 Company Social Media Directors and the CEO of a firm that manages hundreds of high traffic-high profile pages. Collectively, they’ve given me some good advice and keen insights into the state of Edgerank.
- Post Directly To facebook — This was the most consistent piece of advice I received. “Edgerank hates 3rd party posting apps like Hootsuite, etc.,” was told to me several times. There is a new Hide feature that facebook is trying out, where you not only hide the author of the offending/obnoxious post…you can block ALL posts coming through that 3rd party app!
- Post During Prime-Time — Your audience has a prime time, and your insights page will likely reveal this to you by traffic time stamps. Don’t waste a post at 2AM if your biz-oriented crowd is fast asleep. If you are entertainment oriented, don’t post at 8AM unless the data says you are a cup-of-Joe companion.
- Post Links Sparingly — Edgerank hates third party links (say, to your blog post or something you found on HuffPo) as much as it hates 3rd party apps. One social manager explained that links are in “dead-last” when it comes to Edgrank’s affinity algorithm. “Furthermore,” he explained, “When you post an URL, not only does that post not see daylight, future posts are punished for it, until you gain back your affinity rating.”
- Post Videos Direct to facebook — This is connected with the last point. When you post a link to a YouTube video, Edgerank doesn’t see that as a video, it’s just another link and in fact …. a link to a mortal competitor’s property. By uploading videos directly to facebook, you are ensuring that it gets much more traffic as native video is the heaviest of all content on facebook.
- Post Once a Day — Unlike Twitter, where there is no Edgerank and the feed resembles the Wild-Wild-West, you don’t need to post multiple times a day to garner attention. If you are a wordsmith or offer inspiration/helpful advice, some experts have told me 2 a day on the weekdays will work. It turns out that facebook owners are sensitive to too many posts and quick to click the Hide key, which means your content won’t get through to them in the future.
Do you have any posting tips for facebook page owners or admins? Please contribute them in comments. If I decide to add one of them to this post, I’ll send you a book on social media or marketing.
