Tag Archives: Edgerank

Social Media

How To See What You Want To See On Facebook

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Last week I wrote a post telling you about Facebook and its Edgerank process and how it limits what you get to see from business pages, fan pages, and even your friends. Personally I think that stinks. However, I also know a way to get around that if you really want to see whatever certain people or certain groups are saying without having to visit all of those folks or groups individually.

If you look towards the bottom of the left side of your Facebook page, you’ll see something like this. What you won’t immediately see is the “more” link, and all that takes is for you to move your mouse over there and it’ll come up. What you see here on my example is a link to my Facebook business page and two lists I specifically created.

Click on the “more” link and you will see something like this, possibly even this large:

You may have never seen this before. All those things you put in your profile that you’re not thinking about… they actually link to a page, whether there’s anything there or not. For instance, I went to high school in Limestone Maine for 2 years and I popped it into my profile, not even thinking about it. Facebook created a page for it, but if I click on the link no one else has ever joined. I can’t say that I specifically created it, but I’m stuck with it on my profile because it’s a real place.

As you’ll also notice there are some other interesting links in here that I didn’t create. There’s Close Friends and Acquaintances; you probably have those on your list page already. You can pull those up and add people to them. What’s funny is that every once in awhile, Facebook will ask you if you want to move certain people you’re connected to into Acquaintances, saying you haven’t talked to them in awhile so maybe you want to see less of what they put out in your stream. For me, close friends is the important one here, along with the other two that I actually created, which I mentioned before.

To create your own list, you see the tab there in the top right. Click on that and it gives you this:

Just name your list, then start adding people or pages you like here. You’ll have to know the names, which could end up being problematic initially because you might not remember everyone if you have lots of connections. But you can always come back to your list to add more if that’s what you want to do.

Once you do this you’re good. You never miss another post or missive from the people you put into these lists, and you can even create a list for people you really don’t want to hear from or see all that often, then hide their stuff from your stream. They’ll still be connected to you, and you can go look at them any time you want in that list, but let’s face it, some of our friends or connections post stuff we might not always want others who visit our page to see.

One last thing. Some of the lists you can delete and others you can’t. If you created it for your own purpose, you can delete it. But if it’s something that Facebook feels others might decide to join, such as my SUNY Oswego link (it already had State University; oh well…), you’re just stuck with it.

It might take you some time to set it up for perfection but once you’ve done it, you’ll never miss, or always miss, whatever you want based on how you want to see things. Cool or what?
 

Business, Social Issues

Facebook Edgerank, Et Al

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Facebook pages; how much fun are they? Truth be told, obviously some people aren’t having much fun at all because they don’t put much new content on it, if they put content on it at all. Two weeks ago I spent some time going through some of the pages I liked to see if they were doing anything, and those that weren’t I “unliked”; you know, when I was a kid that wasn’t even a word. lol

Facebook pages are an odd duck, if you will. We create them because everywhere we’ve gone to talking about them says they can help us with our business. I’m not all that sure, but I do believe that if done right they can at least help give you a presence. But who’s seeing that presence, and what can you do to increase your presence?

There was this article on Jeff Bullas’ blog titled 6 Ways to Increase the Marketing Effectiveness of your Facebook Page, which includes this very cool infographic. It talks a little bit about Edgerank, which is the name of the algorithm Facebook uses to decide just how many people who have liked your page will have the opportunity to see whatever you put on your page. It’s based on a few things; how often those people have come to your site, so they participate in any way, do they ever share, etc. Actually, they use the same algorithm in determining how many of your friends and which friends see your general posts If you’re connected with 1,000 people on Facebook, you can bet that if 100 people ever see any of it you can count yourself lucky, unless you’ve made yourself popular.

Why do they do that? They do it because people share way more long form information on Facebook than they do on Twitter. On Twitter, every person I’m following has the ability to have me see everything they post via a general column. I have the ability to select certain people and put them in segregated columns so I definitely see what certain people post as opposed to everyone, but if I decide to check the general column the skies the limit.

On Facebook people share pictures, blog posts, etc. Some folks write long form prose of some type. If Facebook showed you every single thing that everyone posted, you’d be overwhelmed. Yes, you do have the ability to segregate your audience on Facebook at all, something I’ll cover at another time, but it’s still a lot of stuff.

So now you know why you don’t see everything from all your friends and why everyone doesn’t see everything you put on your Facebook page. How can you improve the odds of getting more people to see your stuff? The link I provided above gives you 6 ways. The idea is that, at least for your business page, you want to add more content to it so people have more to see, and you want to add more images because it’s been proven that people react better to them, but what if you’re not a bit time photographer, or the images you have don’t quite fit what your business is about?

Now, you might want to know how it’s going for me, since I adopted the process I talk about in my link about 3 weeks ago. I mainly post links from my business site since, well, it’s my Facebook business page. lol I do post a link here and there from this blog, the motivational stuff, but not all that often.

For the full month period before the last 3 weeks Facebook was my 5th best source of traffic, and I only had 21 visits. In the last 3 weeks Facebook has moved up to #3 and I had 55 visits in that time. Not only that but I went from a page duration time of 1 minute and 4 seconds to a whopping 14 minutes and 39 seconds. Why anyone would stay on a page for that long I couldn’t tell you, but what could be happening is that people could be sticking around and looking at other pages. And one more thing; from Facebook it’s a lot of repeat visitors, as the rate of new visitors is only 29%, as opposed to 95% from Google and 79% from Twitter.

Not so shabby I’d say. Anyway, I’ve told you about Edgerank, shared a link to an infographic, and a link to my post about ways of finding things you can add to your Facebook business page to help raise the number of people who come by. What else would you like to know? 🙂 By the way, if you’d like to see my page look to the left and click on the link that will take you there; always happy to have more likes for that page.