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Facebook Edge – for better or worse.

A few months back Facebook pimped their ride. Subscriptions, new privacy opt in and outs, timeline based activity feed, “recent stories” now graced your account. There are a number of explanations doing the rounds on the web on why the brains behind Facebook made such dramatic alterations. Some mentioned that the changes were a strategic fronting to Facebook competitors who were gaining momentum with similar graduated feeds and “circles”. The official reply is that Facebook were simply offering users a better social media experience. Whatever the motive, hate it or rate it, the new look alterations applied to the goliath of the social media watering hole is here to stay, for better or worse. And this means that those of us – mainly talking about brands here – looking to use Facebook as a way to share our media need to take note, and adap.

The most evident change up, and at the heart of anyone’s Facebook touch point, is probably your “news feed”. For you social media philistines (jokes) this is where you see a pool of all your friends status updates, photos, and news from your liked pages. You normally find this on your “home” page on Facebook. The new look news feed, now called Recent Stories, has been seriously jacked up. And with the super sizing going on, what exactly appears on our new super walls has also changed.

We can liken this to a bouncer outside a club, called Recent Stories. This bouncer flexes his cyber muscles over all the content updates of our friends and pages that we like. All this content is waiting, in line, to get through the door of the club. Who gets in, and when, is the question? The highest paying customer, of course, and best dressed.

The bouncer’s name is ‘the Edge’ – like U2’s axe man. His Christian name is actually ‘Facebook edge rank’ but for the sake of this blog we will call him the Edge. . .

The Edge is basically a nifty program algorithm that runs its eyes over all of your friends updates and pages that you have liked, collects their news, statuses, photos, videos, links, etc  orders them all and delivers it to your wall. We have likened the Edge to a bouncer but he is also super switched on and an intellectual genius so we can also liken him to a super robotic news editor.  How the Edge ranks all this content is determined by three main factors;  affinity, weight and relevance.

Affinity basically ranks a contents authors relationship with you. If you have been chatting, sharing and generally communicating with a particular person or page on Facebook their affinity will rank higher than someone else who you do not communicate on Facebook regularly with. Some who has a high affinity with you will see more of their content feeding into your home feed.

Weight is determined by the amount of time other people spend engaging with a piece of content.

Relevancy is simply based on the timeliness of content. The older a piece of content gets the lower it lists with the Edge. Same as why you hardly ever see ballies getting their groove on in clubs!
The Edge also has some delimitating factors that he (it) places on shared content. And this is where brands can take extra note.  If a piece of content is uploaded to Facebook automatically, via an RSS feed or Facebook application, for example, they get penalised.

Automatic posting is not new to social networks. Apps that send your Twitter updates to Facebook has been around for years and is not only used by brands. Automatic posting is mainly used to post en-masse from one medium to a number of others, all at once. A blog, for instance, or website news story can use a sharing app to publish to all of their social networks, saving them a lot of sweat. It is a handy time saver and cuts down on resources, basically, a good way to spread media, fast. At the end of the day, it is not a bad thing, but it will hinder you getting through the door at club Recent Stories.

Ultimately, however, brands need to be aware that sharing your media on Facebook is becoming, more than ever before, about getting your audience to engage with your content. Taking that extra minute to post a link directly to your fan page and sharing it, manually, with others, perhaps spicing it up by adding a personal comment or two at the same time, can go a long way. The brownie points you rack up compete better on your audience’s news feed. Think of it as sprucing up your hair and wearing your party best when entering the line at the club.

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