Many Facebook marketers agree that images are the most powerful type of posts for pages seeking engagement. But with Facebook’s page post sorting algorithm (externally known as EdgeRank), only a fraction of a page’s fans will see posts. How can pages optimize their images to get more fans (and friends of fans) to see their messages? PostRocket compiled the answer in an infographic.
Lisa Raphael (left), the social media producer at Katie Couric's daytime talk show Katie, is one of our featured speakers in Mediabistro's upcoming Social Media Marketing Boot Camp, an online event and workshop starting June 6, 2013. Lisa will share a case study on how the hit show uses Twitter to build interest and buzz around upcoming segments. Learn more about our our twelve event speakers and register here. 
You know what happens when you’re among the first to comment on a Facebook post where a friend announces a new job, an engagement, or anything else that produces a stream of “Congratulations.” Your phone ends up constantly buzzing, and the notifications area is always active. But there’s a way to comment on a post and then mute notifications.
So your company is based in San Francisco, but you’ve got a big fan base in Berlin. Posting to your Facebook page at 3 p.m. from California means it’s midnight in Germany. Post Planner has recently launched a way to solve this, by allowing Facebook page admins to post to a determined time zone among fans’ locations. For instance, an admin can make sure that a post will be seen when their fans across the world will be ready to engage with it.
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.
Not everyone is a fan of Facebook’s post-sorting algorithm, which determines News Feed placement based on with whom users would be most likely to engage. But if you’re trying to see more of your best friend’s Facebook posts, or fewer from a habitual oversharer, there is a way to set these preferences.
Facebook has been testing multiple ways to get users to interact with events lately, but a recent addition may be a bit redundant. When users RSVP to Facebook events, there will be a link under the attendees’ names — “See Stories.” This will prompt users to welcome other people who are going to the events with posts.
SocialCode wasn’t the only company to use Facebook data as part of its methodology for selecting the winner of the 2013 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship tournament and select Duke: Facebook itself chose the Blue Devils, as well, filling out its bracket based on participating teams’ buzz on the social network over the past two weeks.
Is Facebook tweaking its process for users to share posts by other users and pages? Some Facebook users (including yours truly) are seeing the social network’s sharing options repeated in the pop-up box that appears when they elect to share posts.
Facebook’s algorithm, which decides what users see and when, has become a hot topic in recent months as the company tweaks it to ensure that users see the content with which they’d be most likely to engage. During a meeting Friday with selected members of the media, Facebook representatives explained that there’s no malicious intent with the changes in its algorithm. Based on how users have engaged with posts in the past, Facebook wants users to see what kinds of stories they’d be most willing to like, comment on, and share.
Actor George Takei has been a fierce opponent of the way Facebook determines which users see certain posts from pages. After reading an open letter from an aggravated page administrator to Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Takei said he’s writing about Facebook’s algorithm — which many people refer to as EdgeRank — in his upcoming book.
