Navigating the Newsfeed: A Dive into Edge Rank Mechanics

All right, everyone. Welcome to today's episode of Let's Talk Social. We have a really, in my opinion, interesting episode to go over something that is called Edge Rank, and this is actually what Meta is using to basically fine tune their algorithm for the actual stories that you see across all your social media platforms that they use. And this entire article I'm gonna be reading through is by somebody named Jeff and he said he has to explain Edge Rank so much that he decided to just write this little article and basically tell everybody how it works. Edge Rank itself is basically something. That again, the Facebook algorithm uses to decide which stories appear in each user's newsfeeds. So the algorithm hides their boring stories. And so if the story doesn't score well or if the post doesn't score well, no one will see it. And This is built into three different parts. You've got the affinity score, your edge weight, as they call it, and then time decay as well. So the first thing that someone sees when they log into Facebook is your newsfeed. So it's a summary of everything that's been happening on your Facebook page among your friends, and all the pages that you follow, and every action that their friends take is a potential new. Newsfeed story, and Facebook calls these action edges. That means whenever a friend posts a status update, comments on another status update, tags a photo, joins a page, any of all that stuff. It generates an edge is what they call it. And it's a little confusing and I've already read through this and it's still a little confusing to me, but we're just gonna keep rolling with that. I'll just tell you everything that this says in here and give you my 2 cents about it. And it says a story about whatever edge it is. You can treat edge, almost like a point into a category is gonna affect like what you're gonna be seeing. And it'd be, as this says here, it'd be completely overwhelming if the Facebook newsfeed showed all possible posts and stories from every single one of your friends. And so Facebook has created an algorithm to predict how interesting each one will be to each user. And Facebook calls the algorithm edge rank because it ranks the edges, as they call it. So again, you're getting points into each category, each edge to determine like what things you're gonna see. As you may know, if you're familiar with TikTok, everyone says, oh, I'm not on that side of TikTok. What that basically is saying is their algorithm is feeding them different content than what you may be seeing. So they filter each user's newsfeed to only show the top ranked stories for that particular user. So, if I pick up my phone and go on Facebook and you pick up yours, we're not gonna have probably any of the same content as we scroll unless we follow the same page and they just post it something. Or if we had really similar interests in demographics about us. So why should you care about this? Most of your Facebook fans will never even see your status updates. And if you run a business, this is a huge deal. You wanna be able to figure out how we can use our edges to our advantage. So Facebook's gonna look at all posts basically across the entire platform of all the people that you follow. And it's gonna ask itself which story has the highest edge rank score for this user, and then it's gonna bring that to the top of the newsfeed. So the thing you're getting served right as you get onto the app is not random by any means. It is something that they actually want you to see. And edge rank is how they were calculating it. It's gonna rank all of the posts. And basically sort your newsfeed based on that. So they want you to stay on the app longer. You have to remember what their intention is with the whole point of their social media platforms, right? They make ad dollars from the more that you scroll because they can serve more ads to you. And so serving you interesting content is gonna keep you on the app longer. The algorithm includes a randomization element and a keyword aggregator. And I've mentioned this in past episodes, but it could be something that you just mentioned like the text on a story. It could be the text you put into the actual reel. It could be in the caption. It knows all of those things, and it's gonna pull it forward as this says here in a keyword aggregator. And Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram has mentioned this in an interview with TechCrunch. It says that Facebook users found it eerie how? Facebook knew what they were interested in, so they started randomizing the newsfeed slightly so it was too accurate in starting to creep people out. And they decided, Hey, we're gonna put a little bit of a randomization on this so it's not. A hundred percent just like creepy and the content that you almost expect to see. You always say the classic example, like our phones are listening to us. I heard a few weeks back that the phones aren't actually listening to us. It's just these algorithms are so fine tuned. They know exactly what you want to see. And so you could have been like, oh, I just started talking about that. Now it's in your newsfeed. There's a million other people just like you, and they're following the trend. Basically. Facebook's edge rank is. Able to predict what you're gonna be interested in, which is creepy. So this says here edge rank is like a credit rating. It's invisible, it's important, it's unique to every single person. And no one other than Facebook knows exactly how it works. So again, this is all proprietary things to them. This article is again, written by somebody who just knows a lot about it, but they don't actually publicly release any of that information. At Facebook's conference, this was in 2010, so 13 years ago, they revealed three ingredients of their main algorithm. This could have changed, obviously, but they're the things I mentioned earlier, your affinity score. Your edge weight and the time decay, the actual post. So we're gonna go over each of these really quick and starting with the affinity score, that basically means how connected a particular user is to the edge. So again, remember, treat an edge like it's a point in the category basically, or categories across all the things that you can see in social media. For example, if I'm friends with my brother on Facebook, And I write frequently on his wall, and we have 50 mutual friends. I have a very high affinity score with my brother, so Facebook knows I'll probably want to see his status updates more than others, meaning you're gonna get served it more. So Facebook calculates your affinity score by looking at explicit actions that you take on social media platforms. Factoring in. The strength of the action. So did you comment versus just like watching it for three seconds, a comment's a little bit worth more how close the person who took the action was to you and how long ago They took the action. Explicit actions include clicking on a post, liking the post, commenting, tagging, sharing, and then friending lastly. So following a page or adding a friend there, and each of these interactions is a different weight that will reflect the score. For the effort required for the actual action that you took. So as I just mentioned earlier, watching a video for three seconds is less commitment than having to go and comment. And so the comments will actually rank your edge a little bit higher in that category. So if I were to comment on a fan page, it's worth more than my friend that commented if I follow the page and they do not, which is worth more than a friend of a friend if they also commented, but they're not following the page either, if that makes sense. It depends like how closely you are connected on the platform. And Facebook's, again, using this algorithm to rank all of these things. And if you go in your newsfeed and you swipe down and hold a refresh button, it's quick. You know how fast the newsfeed can refresh. So it's factoring in all these things in like microseconds. It says, not all friends' actions are gonna be treated equally. So if I click on someone's last status update and I write on their wall all the time, the person's actions influence the affinity score more than the friend who I tend to ignore and not look at their stuff. So if we bring this into the business world, now, this is why I always say the first post someone's gonna see from you could be that post you just made today. That's why it's really important that we put a lot of quality into the post and not just bang out quantity, right? We need to make sure that. When they see it, they're gonna hopefully interact with it. And then that pulls the, pulls them into your edge, basically. Like it says here, a side note is Facebook may actually rank the act of commenting, liking, liking, or visiting a page, even if the page. Is different depending on the source. For example, becoming a fan via an ad will have a lower edge score than becoming a fan by searching for the fan page. And so if you are told like by a friend verbally, Hey, go look up Adidas, and then you go and follow them, that's gonna give you a higher edge score that you're like, you're, it's gonna basically tell Facebook you're more interested in Adidas than you would've. Gotten if you just clicked on the ad and then went into the page. A lot of this kind of makes sense if we had to build out the algorithm ourselves and we're like, how are we gonna make this happen? This makes a lot of sense, right? But it's just bringing it back to front of mind or to the surface level if you've never heard about these kinds of things. And it says if I used to interact with someone a lot, but now I interact with them less, their influence on my edge will start to wear off. And so Facebook is basically just multiplying each action times one over x. Were, X is the. Time since the last action happened. And so you see this all the time, if you have a 2,500 people on your page and you get six likes on average, it's because people have fallen out of like your high ranking for the edge on your posts. And so that's why we need to keep consistent content. We need to keep it fresh and make sure that if we're not getting good engagement, we need to get it somehow so that we can re-rank higher in these people's newsfeeds. The next thing that they talk about here with this is the edge weight. And so each category of an edge has a different default weight. So in plain English, this means comments are worth more than likes. Kinda mentioned this earlier. Every action a user creates takes an edge, and each of those edges except for clicks creates a potential story. So it's gonna impact your newsfeed, essentially. So by default, you're more likely to see a story in your newsfeed about me commenting on a page than a story about me liking a page, right? So what it means is if you start to comment on a business's profile, the likelihood of that business showing backup in your feet is much higher than if you were just to go and like the profile or if you were to like heart one of the stories or any of that kind of stuff. Again, each action has a different weight involved with all of it. Facebook is gonna change the edge weights to reflect what type of stories or what type of posts they think the user will find the most engaging. They're not really transparent about this, but the reason they do this is so they can keep you on the app longer so they can serve more ads to you. It says here, for example, photos and videos have a higher weight than links. So if you're just to post a static a static like text based post on Facebook versus actually putting an image in there or even a video, it's not gonna get as much. Edge rank, or, it holds less weight as we're talking about, than the imager video would. And so that's why it's a little more important to keep mixing in media into the post and not just putting out status updates, which I'm pretty sure not that many people do anymore. Thankfully. New Facebook features generally have a higher edge weight in order to promote the feature to users. So we saw this really heavily last year with Facebook reels coming out to compete against Instagram stories and for whatever reason now, and this isn't even new, the carousels. So if you post multiple images in a row on Instagram, That is actually lifted in the algorithm, as I like to say, it's lifted. It holds a higher edge weight right now than other types of posts would. And this has an example here. When Facebook places is rolled out, they try to do this thing. If you remember years back where you're trying to get people to check in everywhere. And nowadays it's like almost impossible to get anyone to check in because we hold this kind of value in our heads. Is behind. No, I'm not gonna post that to my page. All my friends are gonna see that. And again, during the time of it rolling out Facebook places, those things had a huge edge weight. And that's why you saw so many businesses, I don't know, get$10 off if you check in on Facebook or any of that kind of stuff, because it was actually helping their pages so much and it in turn, turns business. And Again, when you see new features rolled out on social media platforms, especially for your business, use them because it's gonna be really helpful with your edge weight and ultimately your score to your users. Lastly, of the three things that it's doing, and this one's pretty short and sweet, is the time decay. And so as a story gets older, as a post gets older and older, it loses points because it's old news now. It's gonna impact the edge rank of the basically your score if the post is getting older and older. You see this all the time, right? Normally, if you post a video and it gets. 200 likes and, 10,000 views or whatever it is, that normally happens pretty quickly, they start to wear off and just fall to the wayside after a few days, sometimes even a week passes. It's gonna be shown to less and less people because ultimately it's. Losing its edge rank and so when a user logs into Facebook, their newsfeed is populated with edges that have the highest score at that very moment in time. Your status update will only hit the newsfeed if it has a higher score at that moment in time than the other possible newsfeed stories. Again, we talked about you might have 2,500 people on your page, but no one's engaging with the content. There's all these different factors that come in, and even the. Times at which you post is important. And this is also why you can't post two times in an hour, because you're gonna mess with the edge rank that of your post, right? So you're gonna put something out, it's gonna get six likes in the first hour. And if you put another thing out, you're gonna be instantly competing with your own post to be served at that user's feed. And now you've basically broken down. What you could have gotten ranked for that day into two categories now, and then as time passes, they both fall at the wayside. So it's almost like a double whammy doing that. And so that's why we always advocate for quality one. And then also slowing down on the number of posts that we make. One per day is plenty on Facebook, if you're really providing quality there. If you have a huge following, let's say more than eight, 10, 12,000, That's a huge, if it's larger than most of what these small businesses that we work with, see, then you can start to ramp up the number of posts and only if you continue to see the engagement stay with you. So if you are like, Hey, we're gonna try two posts today, spread'em out by three to six hours during the business hours that you're open so people can convert unless you're like an online store and test it and see if one gets 50 and the other one gets five. The quality of the media is about the same, and the whole premise of both of this is about the same, then you probably need to reel it back again, right? You're losing edge rank there. And lastly, as this thing says here, anyone who claims to check your page's edge rank is lying to you. It's completely impossible. Facebook does not release this data to anybody. You can only measure the effects of your edge rank by seeing how many people you reached. So we've all seen reach and impressions, right? And seeing how much engagement you got. And again, these are kind of things that we just talked about that Facebook is using to determine how you're gonna be going out. So there's no general edge rank score, It's changes every single time for each post that you make. And each person that's gonna be on social media, right? We don't know when people are getting on. They have different affinity scores with your page. And so some days you may just get lucky and have people with high affinity scores all get on and around a time when you just made a post. Again, time decay is a huge thing there. They may all get on right after that and then boom, engagement spikes and you're like, whoa, what happened? And doesn't seem like anything's different. This is one of the things that falls into that, you may have had a lot of people on social media recently behind one of your posts with a high affinity score towards your page, and so your posts are gonna get a higher edge rank, meaning more people are gonna see it. And ultimately convert and or comment or do any of the things that we would like them to. And lastly here it says, Facebook does keep their algorithm a secret and they're constantly tweaking it. So the values of comments compared to likes is constantly changing that's not always just a fixed score as they compete with other social media apps as you saw. Maybe you didn't see, but as of two days ago, Instagram just released something that's basically like Twitter built into it. And so as these social media platforms compete with each other, they're changing the algorithm because they're releasing new features. They're doing all these things that needs to happen so that they can make sure that you're spending more time on their app and not on Twitter or not on TikTok or whatever it is. And again, this specifically, the Edge Rank score is exclusive to Facebook and Instagram. However, all of these platforms have some similar type of algorithm, and again, talked about this earlier. If you had to go and make this yourself and you thought really hard about it, and you sat down for a minute, you're gonna land right back where this is, right? You're gonna eventually have to figure out, okay, what gets the most people to engage, even if it's Twitter, a retweet is worth more than a heart and commenting. It's probably worth more in the heart, but not as much as a retweet. So they have to rank all these things and figure out how they're gonna be serving out the post to you. And so your edge rank is ultimately the thing that's gonna be influencing how the post does time of day. And all these things are important. As we talked about time decays in there, the edge weight, meaning like how many people are gonna. Potentially engage with this. And when they do engage, what is the weight of the engagement? So again, a comment is worth more than the like, and then your affinity score. So does this person have a high affinity score toward my page? If so, then we know they're probably gonna be interacting with or engaging at some level. And closing down here says it's hard to trick an algorithm into thinking that your content is interesting. It's much easier to rewrite your content so your fans leave more likes and comments. It says, take your press release and turn'em into questions that compel your fans to engage. Here's some examples. Click if you're interested and seeing our new iPad app fill in the blank, all I want for Christmas is blank. Our latest special is this yes slash no. I brushed my teeth. Last night. We just announced a new brand of toothpaste. Again, like asking for them to engage and having call to actions inside of the post. If you're making reels or tos, again, this applies to all social media platforms. Then you can even build those things into the actual video and again, The text that you even put on the video after you click publish, not the one just in the caption, but the actual text that pops up in the videos. That's all being tracked, recorded, and added into the edge weight in your affinity score for that person's page. So again, the keywords and the keyword aggregation is gonna be an impactor of that. You can have these little call to actions be in the video. You can have'em be in the caption, but ultimately, if you can get more likes and comments on the post, somehow it's gonna give you a higher edge weight on it. And then the affinity score and time decay. Those are really unchangeable things, right? You can't really change. Anyone's affinity score, unless they are gonna be liking and commenting, and as you build that edge weight up, it's gonna make their affinity score towards your page higher. And then time decay is obviously not really a thing that you can impact or change. But the way that we can take advantage of it in the best way possible is make sure to post during your highest engaged time. So if you go into your Instagram insights and the settings, You can see every day of the week and which one's the most popular. And then you can even click into the days and see what hour or what couple hours are gonna be the most popular. And so posting during that time is a way to make sure our time decay is being maximized as much as possible. So if you guys found this interesting at all, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. The whole concept of it again is like obvious, but we never think about it or really talk about it here and especially on this channel. And I'd be glad to hear your thoughts down on the comments, whoever you're watching or listening to this. And if this helped you out in any way, I'd love if you shared this podcast episode with somebody else. And if not, we will see you in the next one. Thank you for watching.