EdgeRank

What is Edge Rank ?

In a nutshell its SEO but on Facebook, yep that’s right I said Facebook makes sense after all Facebook overtook Google in 2010 as the most visited site on a daily basis. So as we start to search in different ways like using social networks instead of a search engine brands and company’s will start to play a more active role within these networks and leverage as much coverage as possible which is where edge rank comes into to play.

Tech crunch called EdgeRank Facebooks secret sauce and we couldn’t agree more.

It first came to light when too very prominent face book engineers named Ruchi Sanghvi and Ari Steinberg explained for the first time how the secret sauce worked and the maths and logic behind the Facebook news feed, which as we all know is the most important page as its what every user sees first when they login to there account. Its actually the algorithms that decide which content is displayed within your newsfeed that they have called EdgeRank.

You will of noticed that the newsfeed only shows you a tiny proportion of all the stories generated by all your friends, unlike twitter which shows everything in a real time time line, and its because of this that developers, marketeers and business owners are trying to ensure that there apps, and published stories make the leap from the unknown to a users news feed the success of this is solely dictated by EdgeRank

From a birds eye view the maths or formula behind the secret sauce is quite simple to understand, think of it this way. Every thing that is displayed in a users news feed is called an object, and when you see an object in the news feed say a status update and you interact with that object that’s what facebook calls an Edge so status update = object and a action such as a like, comment on this object = Edge

Skip to the next post to read part 2