Facebook Rumours, Paying for Posts and Edgerank

Over the past 12 to 18 months there have been so many rumours going around Facebook. Facebook are forcing you to pay for posting on your page, forcing you to promote your Page posts, your Page posts can’t be seen unless you promote them, and last but not least Facebook are nasty, horrible and money hungry. Let’s take a good look at what is really happening. I am going to address that last comment first – Think about this. Facebook have provided you with a platform that for the most part works really well for free, they also provide you with a place you can advertise your business for free. The only time they ask you to pay for anything is for advertising space on their site nothing more.

I don’t know if you realise this, but the amount of users on Facebook reaching into the hundreds of millions almost 1 Billion now means that Facebook must pay for their own server farm. What’s a server farm I hear you ask? A server farm, also called a computer cluster, is a group of servers that is kept in a single location. These servers are networked together, making it possible for them to meet server needs that are difficult or impossible to handle with just one server. With a server farm, workload is distributed among multiple server components, providing for expedited computing processes. In the past, server farms were most frequently used by institutions that were academic or research-based. In today’s world, they are commonly employed in companies of all types, providing a way to streamline weighty computerized tasks. Facebook’s server farm is 300,000 feet of buzzing, scalding Facebook servers in a spot so cold, they can just let the air in. The climate-cooled farm will suck enough electricity to power up to 40,000 American homes, but amazingly will be powered entirely through hydroelectric power and looks like this – and is basically filled to the brim with computers in long rows and stacked 12 high so that Facebook runs the way you want it to run even with nearly 1 Billion people using it.

Next – Are Facebook Forcing You to Pay to Have Your Page Posts Seen?

Image via Digital Organics

The simple answer is no they are not. Yes their filter algorithms are getting tighter and more posts are being squeezed off your wall as their spam control tightens up and as the site itself grows larger and larger. The posts you will not see often on your wall though are filtered out by what Facebook call the Edgerank Algorthim  so you have control of that in a few different ways.

The reasons for the algorithm changes are mainly because we are all Liking more Pages and Friending many more people than we used to and it would be impossible to see everything, so the algorithm is set to allow you to see more of the people, Pages and posts you have interacted with before. Using your own actions as the basis for the filtering.

What the changes mean for you:

What Facebook says about the recent updates:

” We’re continuing to optimize the news feed to show the posts that people are most likely to engage with, ensuring they see the most interesting stories. This aligns with our vision that all content should be as engaging as the posts you see from friends and family.  

The more engaging your content, the lower the impact this optimization should have on your reach going forward

Feed is optimized to show users the posts they are most likely to engage with, where engagement is defined as clicking, liking, commenting, or sharing the post – or in the case of offers, claiming the offer.

Posts that are more likely to be engaging tend to appear higher in feed. Some of the strongest factors that influence this are how engaging an individual post has been for other users who have seen it, and how engaged a user has historically been with other posts they’ve seen from that page. Feed also takes negative feedback into account, which is the number of people who have hidden a post or reported it as spam.

Finally, if a page has a piece of content that it feels will be very engaging e.g. A good offer, a great photo, an announcement, etc. then using paid media to “boost” that post to fans in newsfeed can be an effective tool to increase engagement with fans.”

• The most recent changes to the Edgerank algorithm have filtered your posts right off the walls of those who never or very rarely interact with your page so many will simply no longer see you posts at all.  So what does this mean for you, the Page owner?  It means your engaged user percentage is going up up up. If earlier a 100 people saw your post and 10 commented, you would have 10% engagement. Now, 50 see it, 10 still comment, so you have doubled your engagement.

There are several ways you can make it easier for you to see more of the posts you want to see and to give your own posts a higher Edgerank Score and a few of these are listed below:

1. To see more posts made by Pages you Like and want to see more of you can create Page ‘Interest Lists’ and place all Pages into one of your lists, then by clicking on one of your Interest Lists you will see all posts by all the Pages in that list. They work just like Friends Lists. To do this click on ‘More’ at the bottom end of the left navigation column on your Home Page. This only works for people and you can only create lists when you are using Facebook as your personal profile. However they work like a treat to allow you to see more of the posts you like at any time and you can encourage your Likers to add you to one of their lists by letting them know about this cool feature. It’s easy to create a new list as you can see once you click on Interests: 
2. The other thing you need to remember is that there are two ways to view your wall, by: Top Stories or by Most Recent which will change what posts you see on your wall and I tend to switch from one to the other to check what’s new quite often. 
3. Next how do you get your posts to rate better with Edgerank? Watch this video below for a full explanation of Edgerank and how your posts can score much higher and be seen more often on your Likers Walls.

This is the site I was using in the video for reference http://www.whatisedgerank.com/ Now what do you think of all this? Are you still worried about why Facebook is doing all this filtering?