The most common question I get asked by people using Facebook for their business is “how often do I need to post on Facebook”. More important than how often you post is the consistency in which you post. Why? These are several reasons which I’ll explain below.
Your Page
The statistic shows that most fans, once they like your page, never return to the page. Their only interaction with you and your page is via their news feed. The process of a standard fan is that they will find your page via their news feed, your website, Facebook Ad or a search, and regardless of how they find your page, they click the like button – and never return. People can now even like your page without even visiting it. New technologies such as the Facebook Like Box for your website allows users to like your page without leaving your website. So you can see that the News Feed is very important, but what exactly is your news feed.
What is your News Feed?
When you first login into Facebook you land on your News Feed. Your News Feed shows you all the updates, photos, videos, comments and changes to your friends’ profiles and to pages you like. However Facebook has made changes to exactly what you see so you aren’t overloaded with information. This means that not everything you post on your page will appear on your fans news feeds. So you can see that getting your posts in your fans News Feeds is very important.
News Feed Optimisation
Similar to Search Engine Optimisation on Google, Facebook now has News Feed Optimisation called EdgeRank. Anything you that publish on Facebook is defined as an object – it could be an update, photo or video etc. Every one of these objects gets a ranking based on three factors. These are affinity (the relationship between you and your fan), interaction with the object (comments, likes, sharing etc) and time. Together they combine and provide your object with an EdgeRank. Studies have shown that objects with a really low score may not even show up in the “Most Recent” news feed. I have defined the three factors below for you.
Affinity – Each time a user interacts with your page – likes, comments, views a photo etc it increases your score
Interaction – it’s been found that videos and photos rank higher as there is more interaction required by the user. For example it takes the user more time to view a photo as they have to click on it to open compared to click the like button on a status update.
Time – More recent objects are ranked higher as people don’t want to read what happened yesterday or last month, they want current upto date news, and this is what Facebook wants to give them
So how does consistency in posting help increase your EdgeRank score and get you seen in the news feed of your fans. The best way to explain this is via my fan pages Insights. Below I have some data from Jan 2011 to April 2011. At the beginning of January 2011 and I started Facebook Advertisements and increased my fans. At this time I was increasing my likers and posting frequently on my page. Then from the 16th March to the 15th April I travelled overseas and didn’t post much. As a result my post views have significantly decreased and so has my interactions because I’m not showing up in my fans news feed any longer. Here are the statistics.
Feb 2011 was my best month for a couple of reasons. I had over 120 new likes and these are important because each time someone likes your page it goes in their news feed and their friends see this post and can like your page directly from the news feed. Then with all the new people and the types of posts, your posts are shown more in the news feeds and hence you get more new likers and the process works in a circle loop. Then in March I didn’t have as many posts which ranked high and hence didn’t appear in the news feeds. The post views only dropped by about 5000 over the month, however the largest impact came in April where the post views decreased to 14,000, about a quarter of what they were previously.
So the goal is to increase your post views by consistency posting content which ranks highly.
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