What is Facebook’s Edgerank ?

The average Facebook user 130 “friends” and follows plenty of Facebook pages. If every single action of your friend showed up on your Facebook you you would be totally overwhelmed. In order to optimize your Facebook experiences, a formula called Facebook EdgeRank was created.

Facebook EdgeRank decides what’s most important to display on your page. If Facebook EdgeRank decides it’s not important, then it gets dropped off the Feed – very bad news for a business owner who isn’t getting much Facebook interaction from fans and wants his or her brand to stay in the forefront of people’s minds.

There are three basic components to the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm: Affinity, weight, and time decay.

“Affinity” refers to the user’s relationship with the item’s creator. For example, if you have an old acquaintance whose Facebook profile you haven’t visited in two years, they would have a very low affinity ranking. If you have a significant other whose profile you visit every day, they would have a very high affinity ranking. This is good for Facebook EdgeRank.

“Weight” combines what the item is and how it’s being interacted with. As for the “what,” videos, photos, and links are generally considered to have the highest weight. In other words, if a fan views a video on your page, this will score far more points in Facebook EdgeRank than if they simply visit your page.

The other component to Facebook EdgeRank is how the item is being interacted with. A “Like,” for example, gets less weight than a comment.

“Time decay” refers to how recent the item is. Old news drops out of the news feed, so newer items are more likely to appear on a feed than older items.

So now take a look at your page and you will notice that most of the posts are from your “active” friends.