Facebook has an algorithm (externally known as EdgeRank) that determines who sees which posts at which times. It’s meant to present users the content with which they’ll be most likely to engage. Many users hate it. Even more page administrators despise it. But can it actually help both? Yes. There’s already a site where every post (whether it’s from your best friend or a random brand) is weighted equally, and it’s called Twitter.
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Facebook has been aggressively rolling out new advertising vehicles over the past few months, but it appears as if the site is going to focus on what it’s got going now. In an earnings call Wednesday with investors, Facebook’s top officials said that the company is more set on making sure that the types of ads that are currently in place are the kinds that will be relevant for users and generate engagement. However, as some brands improperly use or overuse News Feed ads, users may be less likely to do much more than keep scrolling.
Facebook has been tweaking the options within promoted posts for pages, but social media expert Jon Loomer noticed recently that page administrators can now promote posts to everyone on the social network.
Facebook’s News Feed is sorted by an algorithm that many people call EdgeRank. It weighs not only the timeliness of posts, but their relevance to users. Facebook wants to make sure that the posts users see within News Feed are the ones they’ll be most likely to engage with. It’s why users tend to see posts from pages they’ve commented on and friends they’ve shared with more often than pages and people they don’t really post about. Mike Maghsoudi of PostRocket and Facebook expert Jon Loomer both explained the algorithm in posts recently.
Several Facebook page administrators have noticed that the promote button on posts in the admin panel may be a bit different. Facebook is apparently testing new verbiage to get page owners to pay to promote posts, such as, “Get More Reach,” “Boost Post,” and “Advertise Post.”
Most users do not have access to Facebook’s revamped News Feed yet, as the social network is rolling it out gradually, but if screen shots aren’t enough to quell the curiosity of those still awaiting the new News Feed, videos may do the trick.
For some Facebook page administrators, the site recently added a new metric to insights — returned value. However, as social media experts Jon Loomer and Dennis Yu found out, the social network didn’t mean to roll out returned value at this time, and it has since pulled it back.
After Facebook announced that a bug led to reported reach being lower for many pages, social media expert Jon Loomer started wondering why several marketers see reach as the holy grail of insights. Facebook claimed that the bug only tweaked the reporting, but not the actual results, meaning that reach was actually higher than realized for many pages. Loomer feels that engagement, not reach, is what page administrators should strive for.
Facebook marketing expert Jon Loomer is 100 percent annoyed with Facebook’s 20 percent rule, as in, from Section III.D of the social network’s advertising guidelines: “Ads and sponsored stories for news feed that originate from pages may not include images with more than 20 percent text.”
More companies are catching on to a Facebook ad product that used to be mainly used by Amazon: domain sponsored stories. For instance, if you share a link from Amazon, the company can then share that link again on friends’ news feeds at a later date. Facebook marketing expert Jon Loomer wrote in-depth about how a page administrator can create a domain sponsored story and gain successful click-through rates on those ads, but Inside Facebook noted that they can often be confusing for users.
