On Monday February 27th, SiteProNews featured Nancy McCord’s newest research paper called “A Real World Guide to Twitter and Facebook on their home page.” You can read the full article at SiteProNews. The SiteProNews newsletter is one of the preeminent publications to the webmaster professional community and reaches over 600,000 subscribers three times a week.
In addition to publishing Nancy’s research paper on their website and sending it out to their 600,000 subscribers, the SiteProNews Editorial Staff has asked Nancy to write more exclusive articles for their publication on a monthly basis.
We are excited that Nancy’s most recent research paper has gotten this exposure and will keep you posted when she publishes additional articles for SiteProNews.
In this six page guide you will find my candid insights and recommendations on how frequently you should update Twitter and Facebook to grow your follower/fan base as well as my special insights on using both platforms.
To develop the insights for this guide, I watched 23 different Facebook and Twitter accounts for a period of three months and monitored over 2,865 status updates. I personally consider this a fairly small data set, but it is large enough to show some important trends that warrant consideration and further discussion.
As the clients that my firm writes for, are in diverse markets, purchase different service engagement levels, and have unique starting levels of follower/fans, it is impossible to state unequivocally how to specifically grow a social networking account from my data. However, there are some statistical averages and trends that I have found and wanted to share them with you.
I think that you will find this guide helpful, interesting reading, and insightful.
Facebook made some very big changes in the fourth quarter of 2011 that impacted how businesses can use Facebook and how they interact with fans. As a quick review, here’s what Facebook did:
Got rid of the ability to send a note out from your Business Page to all fans. The best feature!
Removed tabs and the ability to do FBML markup pages. You now have to do iframes.
Killed off the notes and discussion sections.
Removed the ability to auto feed your blog to your Facebook Page.
Removed the ability to see who your Business page fans are once they have joined.
Allowed anyone to comment on a Business page, not just fans.
Destroyed the value of a like. No one needs to like your page any more to see or interact with you.
Changed the News Feed for users. People must subscribe to your data to see it in their News Feed.
Changed the personal News Feed so a Business’ News Feed updates are typically lost in the noise.
Actually, these are some very serious changes and have really strangled a businesses ability to connect with users on Facebook and for that matter have caused fan growth for pages under 100 fans to come to a near halt. So, you would think that I would recommend to our business clients to get out of Facebook, but I’m not.
Strategies change and what Facebook has done to kill off brand and business interaction on their platform will certainly change as the blow-back impacts their business. For now, I personally feel that these changes drove businesses into Facebook pay per click initially. As advertising is where Google makes huge returns, Facebook has struggled with trying to get their fair share of advertising revenue from their platform and thus has made changes to force businesses to pay to play.
I still feel that businesses should be on Facebook and keep a presence there, but maybe not in the same fashion as we recommended in early 2011. I recommend at least doing updates once or twice a day and taking a wait and see approach to what Facebook will additionally change in 2012. These changes may open doors again for businesses and brands. Positioning yourself to be back in the Facebook game quickly is a very good strategy.
Just as PageRank is to Google.com placement, EdgeRank is to Facebook placement in a reader’s News Feed. In other words, your EdgeRank on Facebook will determine if a fan sees your updates in their News Feeds and where.
First, here’s a graphical image from TechCrunch and LiveStream that explains the concept of EdgeRank.
The formula for Facebook's EdgeRank.
The bottom-line is that when you have more comments, likes, and tags on a Facebook Business Page wall post, your EdgeRank will be higher. Additionally new news is preferred over old news. If your EdgeRank meets a certain threshold, your post will be show in a subscriber or fan’s News Feed. There appear to be not only EdgeRank numbers for posts but for whole Facebook accounts.
Here’s one free tool that I have found that allows you to check your own Business page’s EdgeRank. Most of the pages we work with that have under 100 fans but more than 80 fans will have an EdgeRank that is about 12 to 15 or average. The free interface is quirky and you may have to refresh the page several times to see your numbers, but this tool will give you a general idea.
Can you ever really know your “real” EdgeRank. Most likely not. It seems this number is like Google’s PageRank (not to be confused with Google Toolbar PageRank) and is secret and a part of the special algorithm that racks and stacks sites.
So what can you do to improve your Facebook EdgeRank?
Post regularly on Facebook.
Post four to five times a day on Facebook.
Post shareable items that are current events or trending topics.
Move away from an all about me focus.
Actively work to engage readers.
Start a log sheet of all fans when added as Facebook will hide their names once added.
Use your list of fans to interact with @messages.
If you have additional suggestions or thoughts on Facebook EdgeRank, make sure to click comments and let me know!
