Not Enough Engagement On Your Facebook Page? Try This Experiment …

Well, it’s taken some time but we finally have an update for the Edgerank Experiment! WARNING: This is not a short blog post! We found a lot of great information that resulted in more fans and a higher level of engagement for our pages!

I’ve tried to categorize the sections below for easy skimming. If you’d like more detailed information about how we achieved results we’d love for you to sign up at the bottom of this post and join in the experiment yourself! Enjoy!

How it began…

As some of you may know, a few months ago I read a post from All Facebook that stated “3% to 7.5% of Fans See Your Page’s Posts”. I couldn’t believe that number was so small! I posted on my own page asking anyone who saw the post to leave me a comment or Like the post. Sure enough, only about 3% of my fans responded!

At the time of my original blog post I decided to run a little experiment. I invited others to participate with me as well. A HUGE thanks to all those who are participating!! You’ll find a link to some of their pages at the bottom of this post. I encourage you to fan them and join The Great Edgerank Experiment with us! Please note. Some of these pages participated by commenting and engaging with our page while we did the same for them. Others actively participated throughout the experiment by changing their engagement behaviors and reporting results to help us get the results you’ll find below. All of the pages listed below made a tremendous contribution to our experiment!

What you may not know…

Facebook is reported to have over 750 million users! With numbers like that, no business owner can afford to ignore the marketing opportunities it offers. Everywhere you turn, you’ll find more articles, tutorials and webinars proclaiming the value of promoting your business on Facebook. The problem is that many businesses with a Facebook presence still believe that making a post to their own business page means that ALL of their fans will be able to see the post. That just isn’t true!

News feed optimization…

Facebook actually determines who sees your posts! First, you should know that Facebook has two options for your newsfeed. At the top of your newsfeed you’ll see “Top News” and ”Most Recent”. Facebook automatially defaults to “Top News”. Each person’s default newsfeed only displays a certain category of posts from friends and pages. Edgerank is the algorithm Facebook uses to determine which of your fans will see your posts. Every item you post is given a score with each of your friends/fans and the posts with the highest scores have a much higher probability of showing up in the newsfeed of individual fans.

*Want to know more about the newsfeed options? Sign up for our experiment below. One of the very first emails you receive goes into more detail. We’ll also be sharing some videos about the newsfeed in the next week or two.

Three factors go into the Facebook Edgerank score:

1. Affinity between the viewing user and the item creator – If you have a lot of engagement with your fans (i.e. sending them messages, liking their comments, viewing their profiles and basically taking an active interest in what they’re doing) that improves the Edgerank of the item you are posting. [ Keep in mind that this means each object you post is given a score as it pertains to each individual fan. Neither your page nor each of your posts have just one score]

2. Weight – This is determined by the level of interaction with a post. Facebook considers that a comment is worth more than a like so any item that gets a lot of comments will have a higher Edgerank score.

3. Time – The older a post is the less important it becomes

In my original post I said that using automation tools to post on Facebook will practically guarantee a very low Edgerank score. In reality, although we believe Facebook places a lower emphasis on posts made by 3rd party apps, our experiment showed that when used wisely, these 3rd party apps aren’t making a notable difference in the level of engagement on our Facebook pages.

The experiment…

When I started my experiment I wanted to find out exactly what it would take to get me into the newsfeed of more of my fans. Facebook’s newsfeed automatically defaults to the Top News so unless Facebook decides your content is valuable to a particular fan, it may never even see their main newsfeed! To start my experiment I did the following:

1. I reviewed the fans on my page and reached out to those I thought could be a strong alliance for my business. I invited them to become friends and opened the door for further communication.

2. I tested the number of posts I was sharing each day. Traditionally I had posted twice but noticed that many very active pages with a lot of engaged fans are posting quite a few times per day. I decided to play around with the number of posts I was making and see what happened.

3. I decided to post manually on my page instead of using automation

4. I decided to try posting a variety of quality and interesting items per day. Video, photos, questions, polls and great information that encouraged people to comment!

and then I did one more thing:

I invited some of my clients and several other businesses to participate as well. In total approximately three dozen pages went into this experiment.

What you must know before you read the results…

Every item you post has an Edgerank score with each individual fan on your page. Your page itself does not have one Edgerank score. It is possible for one item or object that you have posted to be considered very important or have a high Edgerank score with one fan but be considered unimportant or not relevant and have a low score with another fan. So it may show up in one fan’s newsfeed but not in another’s.
We understand that three dozen pages isn’t a large number. This was a relatively small experiment and couldn’t cover a wide variety of industries. However, the results were very clear and consistent across the board. In future, I hope to add more pages, continue the experiment and get even better results for those participating!
No one fully understands Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm. The exact formula has never been released and so we can only estimate what is involved in it.
We used a lot of resources when I set up this experiment. I will list my resources at the bottom of this post so you can go to each one and read more if you would like. Lots of other people have experimented with Edgerank before me. I simply enjoy testing things out for myself and am hoping to simplify the steps to creating a more engaged fan base for my readers so you can be successful more quickly.

This resulted in more interaction ….

1. When someone first likes your page, your updates typically start going into their newsfeed immediately. This changes very quickly if they don’t begin engaging with your posts or coming back to your page to interact. So when new fans arrive, that’s the time to grab their attention and get them to interact!

2. The pages I had actively participating in this experiment got the most engagement out of posting 3-5 times per day

3. Engagement increased when the pages made a point of posting a variety of interesting and engaging content

Questions
Polls
Links
Pictures
Video
Live chats

4. Engagement increased when page owners planned their posts in advance and put some thought into the types of content that would make their target audience want to engage with them. Some actually wrote out their posts a week in advance. These pages did very well!

5. Engagement increased when pages posted 7 days per week – Pages that went silent on the weekend seemed to have a harder time getting people commenting again during the week.

6. Engagement increased when page owners asked fans to talk about themselves

Personal opinions
Knowledge
Interests

7. Engagement increased when page owners posted something fun.

Cute photos
Cartoons
Jokes
Riddles
Games
Trivia

8. Engagement increased when page owners reached out and friended their fans

9. Engagement increased when page owners communicated with their fans via the page owners’s personal profile. When a personal connection was made between the page owner and fans, the fans tended to pay more attention to the page posts and comment more regularly.

10. Engagement inreased when page owners created events on their page that people enjoyed and expected

Trivia Tuesday
Promote your blog post Thursday
Ask the expert Fridays

11. Page owners who used automation tools to post outside of business hours and on weekends still had a high level of engagement provided they participated in a strong variety of the items I mention above. If the posts were thoughtfully written, provided variety, were entertaining,etc and the page owner typically posted manually and was actively involved on the Facebook page then the level of engagement showed no significant difference than that on manual posts. 3rd party apps like HootSuite (my pesonal favorite) have gotten a bad reputation because when the same 3rd party app has multiple updates within your feed, Facebook collapses the objects and only displays a single object. If your fans can’t see your updates then they obviously can’t engage with them! You can get around this by using those third party apps wisely. Don’t use them for every post, but you can definitely take full advantage of them as long as you use them on occasion (i.e. weekends, after hours, etc.)

A Few More Things To Try …

The following recommendations came from my esteemed colleague Mari Smith. She provided wonderful encouragment and support for this experiment! Many are also from the Buddy Media links below. You’ll find a lot of great information there! We incorporated all of these recommendations into our experiment with excellent results!

Keywords that drive the highest engagement rates include words like, “where, when, would and should”. Despite driving some of the highest engagement rates, these question keywords tend to be very underutilized in brand posts.
The word “would” tends to drive more “likes” in particular. Fans may feel that using the like is a way to vote yes on these questions rather than making a comment.
How, who, what, did and why had the lowest engagement rates.
Keep posts short and simple. Posts under 80 characters tend to get 27% more engagement!
Long urls get 3 times higher engagement than short ones
Post in high traffic windows. Typically between 10am and 4pm ET is the best window, however, that may vary by industry so do some experimenting yourself!
Brands who post outside normal business hours (in addition to the regular posts during business hours) tend to have a 20% higher engagement rate.
Engagement rates on Thursday and Friday are 18% higher than other days of the week!
Blogs that are automatically posted to your wall via the Notes app or Networked Blogs tend to have lower Edgerank scores. Go ahead and use these apps but make sure you manually post to your wall!

How long does it take to get more consistent engagement?

During this experiment I have consistently either checked the newsfeed of the pages I was in charge of posting on (some of them belonged to my own clients) or I asked other people participating in the experiment to let me know if they could see my posts in their newsfeed. According to statistics from Jeff Widman from BrandGlue and PageLever, “88% of your fans do not come back to your fan page once they’ve clicked the like button – they only see and interact with the content in their newsfeed”. This means you’ll be competing for their attention against posts from their best friend, their mom and all the other important people in their lives! All the more reason to put some serious thought and effort into creating engaging content!! It took approximately 70 days before we each began to consistently see the other’s content showing up in our newsfeed. It was a very exciting moment!!

In Summary…

Facebook NFO (Newsfeed Optimization) is very similar to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It’s very important and is certainly nothing to be taken lightly. And if you have a website and are marketing your business on Facebook then you should definitely have a basic understanding of how each one works! They can, however, get complicated, are subject to change and can end up taking valuable time away from a small business owner who doesn’t have the resources to hire outside help. Social media marketing is just that. It’s social. If you really want more engagment then you MUST be engaging! You’ll not only attract the individual user but you’ll also meet many of the requirements of good newsfeed optimization!

Here are a few recommendations to help you get started:

Post consistently
Offer a variety of great information
Share your knowledge freely and invite others to do so as well
Give people a reason to come back to your page. If they come to expect certain things from you (Trivia Tuesday, Coupon Thursday, etc.) they are more likely to bookmark your page or come back willingly even if you aren’t in their newsfeed. Once they start doing that, you’ll naturally begin showing up in their newsfeed!
Make a friend list for your fans. Get in the habit of actively engaging with them!
Use the tools wisely. Don’t rely on automation 100%. Don’t rely solely on analytics tools to tell you if your fans are engaged. Get in there! Meet your fans! Get to know them! Talk to them!! And measure your engagement by the people actually posting on your page! Create those raving fans for yourself and they will carry your voice to the rest of your audience!
Results ary by industry and target audience. If at first you don’t succeed, keep trying! The key is consistency in effort!
You are not alone! Join the experiment, exchange ideas, find a partner and work together to find new ways to make that inspired connection with your target market! They’re out there! It’s up to you to make your business stand out for them!

If you’re interested in participating in this experiement – because it will continue – sign up here and get 10 weeks worth of tips, advice and resources that will help you become more visible to your fans! Join us in our experiment, share your results and let’s work together to get more visibility, engagement and interaction with your target audience! If you have any problems getting our emails just email us at info@bizmsolutions.com