Visually Analyze Your Content With Photo Report

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Photo ReportWe’ve built a brand new feature called Photo Report that allows Pro users to visually scan their content and quickly see what’s working. Oftentimes, patterns of topics can emerge from the visual analysis.

Photo Report defaults to a filtered view analyzing Total Engagement. Photos are sized relative to their “success”, as it relates to the metric being analyzed. There are two content types displayed within Photo Report: Photos and Links. We decided to pull in Links too because of the thumbnail that represents them in the news feed. We believe that a good thumbnail can impact the content’s engagement. Continue reading →

Severity Score Breakdown

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EdgeRankWith the launch of our Negative Feedback Analysis feature, we revealed a new metric: Severity Score. There are a variety of different types of Negative Feedback, each type differs in severity. The score weights these types of Negative Feedback to give perspective into how bad the feedback really was.

We believe that the severity of Negative Feedback is as follows:

xbutton > hide > hide all > spam > unlike

We have weighted the Negative Feedback and divided against Total Unique Impressions to give relativity for the number of people who saw it.

Negative Feedback Analysis

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Facebook recently made a significant change to the EdgeRank algorithm that increased the importance of Negative Feedback. As a result, understanding Negative Feedback is now an integral component for optimizing EdgeRank, and keeping at bay any negative impact on your content is more important than ever.

Negative Feedback Analyzer enables marketers to quickly understand how Negative Feedback impacts their content, and offers insight on how to avoid future Negative Feedback.

We built Negative Feedback Analyzer to answer a few
key questions:

  • How much Negative Feedback does my content typically receive?
  • What is the normal amount of Negative Feedback that Pages in my industry receive?
  • How many fans are now unreachable because of prior Negative Feedback?
  • How is Paid Media influencing Negative Feedback for my content?
  • Which topics are creating Negative Feedback?
  • What specific content is receiving Negative Feedback?
  • Of the different types of Negative Feedback, what is the severity of my Negative Feedback?

How To Use Negative Feedback Analyzer

Negative Feedback Totals

Continue reading →

What is More Important: Affinity or Frequency?

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An excellent question was asked on Quora recently: What is the role of history vs. frequency in Facebook EdgeRank success? The question is driving at what has a larger impact, Affinity or Frequency? Simply put, does my affinity with a Facebook Fan have a deeper impact compared to how frequently I publish content?

Answer : It depends on your audience.

As much as we dislike the ambiguity of this response, it really is true. Let’s take a look at why this is the case. First we’ll look at raw data, and then we’ll look at why this theoretically makes sense.

We looked at the Best Post Frequency median for over 10,000 Pages. The median, in this case, is more statistically relevant and more applicable to a “typical” brand than the average Best Post Frequency.

The frequency which resulted in the highest average engagement:

  • Best Post Frequency Median: 1
  • Best Post Frequency Average: 2.4

At first, this seems to illustrate that the quick answer to the original question is Affinity. Post your best content, once per day, at the most optimal time of day. However, not all fan bases are created equal. Continue reading →

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

Dennis Yu on Ads Impact on Organic, Facebook Retargeting, and Local Business

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We sat down with Dennis Yu to discuss a variety of topics surrounding ads, the news feed, and how local businesses take advantage of Facebook.

You mentioned that ads can impact organic, what are you seeing?
Ads don’t cause an immediate impact. They grow the fan base and grow overall engagement over time. As long as you’re running ads to drive fan growth and engagement, you’ll see a steady rise in organic, even if you stop advertising. People have talked about how organic and paid impact viral, but we don’t see viral being big enough to make a difference yet.

Of course, if your fan base goes from 1,000 to 100,000 via ads, and you stayed on message without gimmicks, then you’ll have a lot more organic power, in the same way you get more opens if you grow your email list.

Would you say this is ultimately impacting Affinity for the new users you’re reaching with paid media?
It depends. Some brands run ads so heavily, especially in the newsfeed that they overrun their fans– kind of like a brand you like who has a repeating TV commercial for every episode. At the other end we have brands that don’t even show up or run irrelevant ads in the right rail. Well-targeted ads at the right frequency absolutely increase affinity, which we have measured via fan lifetimes that increase from 25 days (Coca-Cola) to as high as 143 days (The Cosmopolitan casino). Continue reading →

“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 →