Category Archives: News

Viral Reach Skyrockets Due to Facebook’s Major Insights Fix

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[Updated: 03/01/13] // An example of a massive increase new Viral Reach added //

Facebook announced an “Important Update to Page Insights Reporting” last week. Facebook blamed bugs as the cause of Reach and Impressions being under-reported. In the post they suggested the following possible outcomes for Pages:

Overall, we expect most Pages to see:

  • Total reach to  stay the same or increase for most Pages
  • An increase in paid reach if you ran News Feed ads
  • An increase or decrease in organic reach, depending on many factors such as the composition of your fan base, when and how often you post and your spending patterns
  • A change in metrics computed from reach and impressions, such as engagement rate and virality
  • We know that accurate data is fundamental to building and improving your Facebook presence. We are taking this very seriously.  We have already put a number of additional quality and verification measures in place to prevent future bugs and resolve them quickly if they arise.

In the post, they specifically mention monitoring the overall impact “starting on Monday, February 25.” We decided to dive deeper into the numbers to see how Page owners are being affected.

What Did We Study?

We took a look at Monday, February 18th vs Monday, February 25th. We looked at Pages that posted on both days. Our sample size was roughly 1,000 Pages. Facebook specifically mentioned the following metrics to be impacted: Total Reach, Paid Reach, and Organic Reach. We opted to include engagement (Likes, Comments, and Shares) along with Viral Reach into the study. We averaged each day by post for each Page, then looked at the median when comparing Pages.

Continue reading →

EdgeRank Checker Milestone!

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When we started EdgeRank Checker in the spring of 2011, we analyzed about 12 Pages in our first true run. Over the following week, we analyzed a couple dozen. After the first month, we had hundreds of Pages that had connected to the site. Fast forward two years, and we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve now helped over 500,000 Pages organically increase their exposure on the news feed!

ERC_500K_Thanks

Our journey from 12 to 500,000 has been a wild and exciting ride. We’ve helped some of the largest brands in the world, and we’ve helped small and local businesses as well. It all started with a common goal: understand how to maximize a brand’s exposure in the news feed. We’re honored to have helped so many brand managers and agencies along way.

We want to thank you, our customers and our users, for allowing us to do what we love. It’s a new year, and that means new beginnings. We have a lot we want to accomplish this year, and we look forward to continuing to be the leader of news feed optimization.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you!

Facebook Adds New Object To News Feed For Pages

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Lately, Facebook Page Admins have complained to Facebook regarding decreases in Reach. Facebook has made changes to improve the quality of their news feed, but sometimes at the cost of some Pages. The latest significant change to the news feed increased the importance of Negative Feedback. After much confusion and anger over the Pages that were negatively impacted, Facebook quickly rolled out the “Pages Feed”. The “Pages Feed” did little to nothing to help the exposure of Pages within the news feed.

However, Facebook recently rolled out a new news feed object that creates a call to action to your Pages Feed:

Pages Feed Object

The new object is a relatively small adjustment to the news feed, but is an obvious call to action to drive more traffic to the little used Pages Feed.

Is It Here To Stay?

We expect this new object to slowly fade out of existence, along with the Pages Feed widget. Typically anything that requires clicking a small link in a secondary (or even a tertiary) navigation menu, will hardly be used at all.

Nonetheless, it’s a positive sign to see Facebook make attempts at improving Page’s exposure within the news feed.

Improved Site Speed

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We’re excited to announce that we’ve taken substantial steps to improve EdgeRank Checker’s speed! We’ve decreased page load times and other time consuming tasks.

After our initial launch, we experienced rapid growth that stressed our servers. During that time, we’ve worked hard to maintain our server’s capabilities to keep up with increasing demand. We’ve recently taken more drastic steps to handle our current load, and keep load times at reasonable lengths of time.

We want to personally apologize for any inconveniences that our prior site speed issues may have caused you. Thank you to all of the customers who were extremely patient and supportive. We look forward to the future and continued improvement to the tool.

We sincerely appreciate your patience, and hope that you find EdgeRank Checker more convenient to use.

Cheers,
Chad Wittman
Founder, EdgeRank Checker

“Upcoming Events” Hint At New EdgeRank Signal

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Facebook recently unveiled a news feed object: “Upcoming Events”. It’s still undetermined if Facebook is testing the object, or if it’s being rolled out across the network. The object was placed atop my news feed while looking at the Top Stories. At first glance, this appears to be a rather mundane update to the news feed, but to us it represented much more.

I’ve been long predicting the rise of a wider diversity of input signals into the EdgeRank algorithm to increase the relevancy of the news feed. Previously, it was only speculation whether Facebook considered geo proximity as a signal, and ultimately a factor.

This object in the news feed represents an indisputable signal into EdgeRank. In this particular example, Facebook looked at my location (Chicago, IL) and compared it against the location of an event of a local Chicago band. I’m a fan of the band on Facebook, but was not previously invited or connected to the event. Facebook identified the Affinity between myself and the Page, as well as our geo proximity!

Albeit a subtle change, this represents the first location based input signal into an object on the news feed. This news should be exciting for brands on Facebook, especially brands that have a local retail presence. Having geo proximity with your fans could potentially drive greater Reach for your objects.

More elaborate signals will continually be added to EdgeRank as the algorithm grows with sophistication. Geo proximity is an excellent new addition as it could also have significant influence in the mobile news feed, which offers a huge opportunity for a wide variety of new input signals.

 

Facebook Reveals More Insight Into The News Feed – Full Breakdown

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For the first time, in a long time, Facebook has addressed more details regarding the EdgeRank algorithm. Facebook’s news feed product manager Will Cathcart simplified how the news feed works with the following:

1. Prior interaction with an author’s posts: If you like every post by a page that Facebook shows you, it will show you more from that page.

2. Other people’s reactions to a specific post: If others on Facebook are shown a post and ignores it, or complains, it’s less likely to show up on your news feed.

3. Your interaction with posts of the same type in the past: If you always Like photos, there’s a better chance you’ll see a photo posted by a page.

4. If a specific post has received complaints by other users who have seen it, or the page who posted it has received lots of complaints in the past, you’ll be less likely to see that post. This factor became a lot more prevalent with the EdgeRank update in September 2012.

We’re going to break down each component to help provide deeper context into what that means for your brand. Continue reading →

How Much Content Does EdgeRank Hide? A look at the Unfiltered Feed

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TechCrunch reported the news of a link that allows Facebook users to see a nearly unfiltered news feed. Facebook later removed the link, but EdgeRank Checker was able to analyze it before it became unavailable. The difference between the Most Recent Feed and the Unfiltered Feed was quite astonishing—we’re going to break down what you can learn from the differences between the two, and what to do about it.

What Did We Analyze?

We analyzed our Founder’s (Chad Wittman) News Feed, looking at a one hour period during the day. We counted the objects for both feeds and also categorized them based on their function. Most categories are self explanatory, with the exception of actions. We defined actions as “John Doe is now friends with Jane Doe”, “John Doe likes EdgeRank Checker”, “John Doe is now in a relationship with Jane Doe”, etc.

What’s The Difference Between The Unfiltered & Most Recent Feed?

What Does This Mean?

62% of Pages’ posts during this 1 hour time period didn’t even make it to the Most Recent Feed. Users who browse in Most Recent mode are still missing a majority of the content by pages they are fans of. [Tweet this] Understanding and leveraging EdgeRank is vital to News Feed success, even with the Most Recent Feed option.

14% of the Most Recent Feed was Sponsored Posts. This seems to be generally in line with the rumors swirling that the News Feed is intended to remain 80% Organic/20% Paid.

39% of the Unfiltered Feed’s objects were actions. While ~1% of the objects within the Most Recent Feed were actions. There are dozens of actions taking place within Facebook at any given moment (see the Ticker), so it’s not surprising to see Facebook filter many of these out for the casual user. This is intended to improve the typical Facebook browsing experience.

What Can I Do About It?

There are a few key takeaways looking at these differences:

  • A majority of Pages’ posts don’t even reach the Most Recent Feed
  • It appears the News Feed is truly intended to be 80% Organic/20% Paid
  • The Most Recent Feed hides a significant amount of Friends’ activities

Aside from any insights this brief look into the inner workings of the News Feed may have provided, the strategy is the same: create and deliver excellent content. The brands that understand this, and succeed while doing so, will continue to reach a healthy segment of their fans.

Did Photos Lose News Feed Dominance On Facebook?

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On September 20th, it was reported that Facebook made a significant change to EdgeRank. This change resulted in a loss of Organic Reach for a vast majority of Pages. The fallout of this change is still being analyzed and many pages are reporting changes in their optimal content types. EdgeRank Checker decided to look at the data to see if these changes made any impact on the dominance of photos on the news feed.

Continue reading →

5Loom’s 3X5 Sessions Event Recap

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In this recap blog post, we’re going to readdress some of the questions and concepts that were discussed by our founder Chad Wittman at the 5Loom 3X5 event in New York City.

Chad is in the middle [Photo by 5Loom]

EdgeRank Checker was represented by founder Chad Wittman at 5Loom‘s first annual 3X5 Sessions, hosted at the Tribeca Grand Hotel. EdgeRank Checker took part of the day’s first session, Facebook Power Hour. Panelists included Chad Wittman from EdgeRank Checker, Michael Jaindl from Buddy Media, John Battaglia from Wildfire and Christine Pierpoint from IMRE. The Facebook Power Hour was an excellent balance of unique perspectives from some of the most innovative social media companies looking at the future of Facebook marketing.

EdgeRank / GraphRank
There seems to be a slight misconception with the terminology of EdgeRank and GraphRank. EdgeRank was first revealed at f8 2010 as an algorithm that determines what is displayed, and how high, on the news feed. GraphRank, which was revealed at f8 2011, is an algorithm that determines which apps receive exposure to potentially interested users. For a more thorough explanation of EdgeRank, check out our detailed explanation: What is EdgeRank? For an explanation of GraphRank, check out our popular blog post: What is GraphRank?

Currently, GraphRank is a subset of EdgeRank. What does this mean for a brand? It depends. A vast majority of brands publish their content via their fan pages, which means their content is only governed by EdgeRank. Brands that have developed deeply integrated applications that publish to the news feed (think Spotify, social readers) on the behalf of the user, will be competing with GraphRank. GraphRank provides an opportunity for these brands to gain additional exposure to more users.

In conclusion, nearly all brands need to be focused on EdgeRank. The brands that are able to deliver high quality applications need to understand GraphRank.

Future of Mobile
Mobile is obviously a huge opportunity for Facebook moving forward. Facebook recently enables marketers to advertise within the mobile news feed. This is a huge opportunity for both marketers and Facebook. Geotargeted Sponsored Stories that tie together both affinity relationships, and location information, are immense opportunities for Facebook to extend its mobile reach. Facebook will continue to pursue this heavily.

Facebook seems determined to fully intertwine both earned media, and paid media, into one seamless experience for the end user. They are in a unique opportunity to provide this solution like ever before. Imagine Sponsored Stories targeted based on a user’s affinity with a brand, their affinity with a location, and then using their OpenGraph information to tailor Paid Media to catch their interest. We’re talking about a whole new ecosystem of advertising!

Paid Media + Earned Media
The future of Facebook marketing will be executing an intelligent approach to integrating Paid Media and Earned Media strategies. Brands that begin to understand this relationship, and how to leverage it, will be able to achieve great results. It’s our vision with EdgeRank Checker to aid marketers with the opportunity to maximize their Organic Reach (and Earned Media) then identify the best case situations to apply Paid Media.

Future of Facebook
We’re very excited about the opportunities that Facebook has to achieve even more marketing successes. The platform has reached an incredible amount of users, but that’s only the beginning. The next stage of integrating users interests and activities, into targeted advertisements, begins a new era of marketing. Assuming the Facebook structure remains the same, the news feed will be where true marketing will take place. We strive to help brands understand the news feed better than anyone else—and look for our role to expand in this sector.