Look

Prayag Verma | Thursday, November 07, 2013 | No comments

For almost three years I have been one of those guys working as a freelancer telling companies why and how they should build fan bases on all kinds of social media channels. I made an income telling what works and what doesn’t. Facebook has become increasingly important for brands and companies. As a company you can do amazing things with Facebook. Building a community around your brand is not that hard as long as you follow some basic social media marketing principles and make your fans happy.

Rule no1 was: don’t just advertise, social media is social so don’t just shout out all your products every day, but add value to your readers. Give them insight in your operation, give them interesting tips on using your products or go back to the core of your business, your mission, and use Facebook to help with your mission.

The race for the attention
As soon as people’s Timelines started to get flooded with messages, a big problem surfaced: Facebook had to figure out how to get the most important messages in front of the readers. They came up with Edgerank.

EdgeRank was put in place to ensure users don’t get overwhelmed by content and to reduce spammy content in favor for interesting content.
Edgerank is a calculation that decides how important a message is to the reader, and thus how high in the Timeline this particular piece of content shows up. The Edgerank formula consists of three things:

Affinity
If you spend more time talking or interacting with certain friends or pages, your affinity with those people or pages will increase.
Weight
Weight is the level of interaction a piece of content gets (likes, comments and shares).
Time Decay
Over time, a posts relevance decays, making it less important and pushing it down the feed.