Quality vs. Quantity in Social Media: What’s Your EdgeRank?

Social media provides a cost-effective way to boost a business’ online presence, but how can your company’s online presence be boosted if no one actually sees your social media posts? Since McCauley Marketing offers social media services along with marketing elements like website design, advertising, and customer relationship management to name a few, we like to keep our readers updated as these components change. If you keep up with our blog you’ve seen our posts about getting the most out of your social media profiles, taking advantage of social media, and actually getting results on social media, but have you ever heard about EdgeRank?

EdgeRank is an assessment tool that Facebook uses to determine the quality of a fan page’s content to determine the page’s visibility—meaning not all of your posts reach your entire audience. In fact, many posts only reach a fraction of the page’s fans. When Facebook users interact with a fan page update (meaning they click “like,” comment, or share the post), they are creating an Edge. The Edge’s value is based on three factors: affinity, weight, and time decay. Affinity measures how close the user is to the brand; weight measures the importance of a specific interaction between the user and brand; and time decay describes the amount of time that passes between when the post was created when a user interacts with the post. These factors are added together to determine a page’s EdgeRank. The higher a page’s EdgeRank, the more likely they will appear in users’ newsfeeds.

Although this information can be a bit scary for businesses who thought that their posts were feeding to the hundreds or even thousands of their Facebook followers, it is very important information to know and should change your approach to social media. Many people measure social media success by the volume of their audience, but a large portion of social media success really should be gauged with audience interaction. It’s the idea of quality over quantity. If you make four Facebook posts a day and your page has a low EdgeRank, you’re still only reaching a small fraction of your audience, but if you make one post that will engage your fans and get them interested enough to interact, you will reach a larger audience.

The McCauley Marketing team knows the value of quality over quantity and strives to produce quality work for our Atlanta marketing clients. We encourage you to think outside the box when it comes to marketing efforts, especially in social media marketing. Take the time to make relevant, timely posts that will truly engage your audience. If you haven’t already, be sure to connect with us on Facebook and Twitter.