How to Increase Your Facebook Page EdgeRank Quality Score

Facebook has now become the default social site for businesses. So how do you know if you have a successful Facebook page? Most are obsessed with their fan count. But the reality is your fan count doesn’t mean much if your fans can’t even see your updates in their newsfeed right? Considering the average user has 120 friends, along with several pages they’ve liked, you need to compete with all posts from their friends and other pages to have your post appear as a ‘top news’ story.

Top news stories as the name suggests, are the posts Facebook believes people will find most interesting. What you might not know is it is determined by the EdgeRank algorithm.

How is EdgeRank determined?

There are three main factors:

1. A fans affinity with you. This is the level of interaction between a fan and yourself. The more interaction with your Facebook page they have, the higher their affinity with your page.
2. The weight of your posts. This refers to the level of interaction your post receives such as Likes, comments and shares.
3. Time Decay. As expected, over time a post’s relevance decreases as new news takes over in importance.

You can find out your EdgeRank quality score through the Facebook Tool EdgeRank Checker. You simply need to authorize the app to connect with your Facebook page to view your quality score.

While you can determine your score for free, if you want EdgeRank Checker to analyze your page to help increase your score, it will cost you.

Based on the criteria EdgeRank considers, here are free tips on how to increase your EdgeRank score:

1. Encourage interaction: Rather than a posting statement, ask questions. If you’re including a link to an interesting article, Facebook will display the heading and the first sentence already. So don’t bother explaining what the article is about, and pose a question instead. You can also create trivia questions, caption contests, and surveys. These prompt interaction from your fans and are more heavily weighted. The more people who respond, the likelier it will be seen. Try and make it easier for people to respond by using ‘fill in the blank’ questions or having them choose between two alternatives.
2. Be engaging: Don’t oversell or spend all the time posting about your company (Though several studies have shown that fans love it when you offer discounts and promotions via Facebook). Post interesting content from other sources; whether it is articles, videos, photos or the like. Offering valuable external content to your fan motivates them to pay attention to content about your company as well. You can also pose questions or teasers to encourage them to click the link or photo such as ‘the ending made me laugh more than I have in a long time’. Note: If the business or blogger you’re linking to has a Facebook account, make sure to tag them in your post. This means you post will show up on their wall which gains more exposure for you.
3. Be media savvy: Adding photos and videos to your posts require people to click to view. These clicks increase your weight.
4. Be consistent. Since a post’s relevance declines over time, posting regular content will keep the conversation fresh.
5. Just ask. Don’t be afraid to ask your fans to Like, Share or Comment on your post, just don’t go overboard with this!
6. Post Manually. There have been several studies that suggest posting via a third-party app decreases your likelihood of engagement per fan (on average) by about 80% AND the likelihood they see your post at all (Edgerank Checker recently tested that theory too). I recommend holding off from posting from Hootsuite, Buffer, Later Bro or any other third party app unless you cannot post it manually.
7. Time your post. You want to determine the optimal time to post to gain the more exposure and feedback. You can experiment with this, or use a third party app such as EdgeRank Checker which analyzes your posts and reports on optimum posting days and times.

That’s it on EdgeRank quality score. The main point to take away from the tips above to increase your quality score is to provide engaging posts. It takes a lot of trial and error and contrary to what some social media ‘experts’ are sprouting, it’ll take a lot more than a few minutes a day. But if you really are seriously about building your presence on Facebook, with the right mix of time and content you can begin building an engaged community of fans (who actually see your posts!).