Facebook SEO or News feed optimization: A Complete Guide

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Before I begin with the Facebook SEO topic, I want to let you know why we have changed our blog name from Facebook bridge to Fans Bridge, the reason for that because Facebook doesn’t allow to use their name in any way, thanks to Ms. @PamMktgNut because she noticed me about this. Without her I’ll lose this blog sooner or later.

Now let’s get started, A lot of people are asking why they don’t get result like ( comments or likes ) for their pages, This is because your updates don’t show up in the top news Feed, So in today’s post I’ll cover what you should know about this.

What Is Facebook SEO / NFO?

Facebook SEO or NFO is the practice of optimizing your new updates so that you appear in the top news feed wall. “NFO: is a short-cut of News Feed optimization” Moreover, What most people don’t realize is that your feeds are split into two categories:

Most Recent: Most Recent will be in absolute chronological order everything that comes through fan pages and friends.

Top News *( default): is what Facebook has decided on your behalf what it thinks is important to you, that’s based on how often you interact with the page, your relationship with them, etc.

NOTE: that only 15% of Facebook users change their news feed settings to return to the most recent news.

So how to deal with Facebook SEO / NFO?

As you know Google uses Pagerank, Facebook calls it EdgeRank. Every piece of content on Facebook, whether a personal profile created it or a fan page created it, it must passed through the filter, which is EdgeRank.

Moreover, No one knows exactly how Facebook SEO / NFO works or the EdgeRank score, is basically an algorithm. The exact algorithm is under lock and key, and I think all the experts in the world don’t necessarily know the precise algorithm, maybe only Mark Zuckerberg knows it.

Now, our goal is news feed optimization ( NFO) or what i love to call it Facebook SEO to get our updates into the top news feed section.

There are three primary components of Facebook edgeRank:

Facebook EdgeRank

1- Affinity Score The first component of news feed optimization is the affinity score. Think of that as the relationship that your fans have with not just your fan page but that specific piece of content.

2- Weight In addition, you’ve got the weight. There are various types of content, obviously whether it is a well-posed photo, video or link etc. So that’s must be taken into account. We’ll talk about that quite more about it later.

3-Time Decay (Recency) Then there’s what we call “time decay” also known as recency. Basically, it’s how long ago the piece of content or that wall post was created they call it edge.

Lastly, what’s really important to understand is that every one of your fans has a different EdgeRank score with every piece of your content. You often see things out there reports and different systems, where you can get a score and you’ll find out how to prove your EdgeRank score. But it’s not like you have a score that you can improve with all fans. Each fan has a different one, and it depends on how often you get them to interact, this is the game of Facebook SEO / NFO.

Strategies to increase your Facebook SEO / NFO Effectiveness

Let’s talk about some strategies for effective wall posts. What exactly is going to cause your fans to engage more with that content!

Where is Your Content Seen?

1- Your Fan Page Wall.

2- The News Feed of Your Fans

3- Social Plugins (e.g. Like Box)

4- Other Plugins (e.g. Wibiya Toolbar)

Types of Content There are various EdgeRank Types:

1- Photos. Tend to get heavier EdgeRank weight.

2- Videos.

3- Links.

4- Status updates.

5- Questions.

6- Apps. Updates through apps get lesser EdgeRank weight, more about this later.

now that we know where our content get published and the types of this content, let’s move more in how to increase the Facebook SEO / NFO effectiveness of our updates.

1- Length of Posts The longer your posts, the lower the engagement rate. The more verbose you are, the less people have time to read your stuff. A study by Buddy Media showed that posts under 80 characters or less increase engagement. They actually get 27% higher engagement.

2- Use Long URLS I thought this was really interesting. This one I found surprising, but again, you can instantly see there’s logic behind it. It’s really better to use long URLs. You can avoid link shorteners. What’s more, anther study from Buddy Media show that three times higher engagement rates for posts that use a full-length URL.

The reason of that is the trust factor. People want to know, they are so wary of all these links. You see the mass of spam going around right now, like “See who’s checked your profile” It’s just crazy the amount of spam links that are going around. So people are a little bit wary of clicking on links. But when you put the full-length URL and they can immediately see where they’re clicking, there’s a trust factor there. So experiment with it. See if you can get a better engagement rate using a longer URL.

3- Post in High-Traffic times What you should know that you don’t necessarily want to emulate the exact strategy or best practice of another business or brand because it might be totally different for your audience. So you do actually have to experiment. You can certainly look and study and try different things and experiment, but ultimately, you’re going to come up with your own sweet spot, What Ms. Mari Smith calls it , “high traffic window.”

In a study by Buddy Media on the different companies in a broad range of industries — I’ll mention a few in a moment — basically, they found posting between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard, which is 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Pacific, is the sweet spot. Engagement rates on Thursdays and Fridays are 18% higher than other days of the week, that’s also in Buddy Media’s report. Like I said, experiment to find your own.

Furthermore, here’s a really interesting fact on when you post outside of business hours, which many brands and businesses are missing out on this key factor, the fact is that brands that post outside of business hours have a 20% higher engagement rate. That’s not instead, I hope you understand that.

4- Post frequently the key here is balance. It seems that constant streams of content keeps the  Facebook SEO / NFO algorithm happy. If you post several times a day, make sure it is unique content each time, Don’t bore your fans and I guess that two to three updates per day is a sweet spot.

5- Manual vs. Third-Party Apps? there’s a lot of different speculation and conversation about this right now in particular. Do you remember the weight factor? the second primary component in the EdgeRank. Facebook actually gives less weight to third-party apps. Any content that comes in through a third-party app will get slightly less weight than if you post manually. For example, through NetworkedBlogs, HootSuite or whatever that’s not literally writing on the Facebook wall. So my recommendation that you go manual in posting updates.

Most Likes Within 1 Hour 20 Minutes

This is another fascinating study by Visibli. Your content on Facebook, (within one hour and 20 minutes will have half the likes) that it’s ever going to get, (Within two hours and 15 minutes, 60%), ( Within four hours , 70%.), ( Within seven hours, 80%) And finally ( Within 22 hours, your post has gotten 95% of the likes) it’s ever going to get. Good to know about this isn’t it

Tipping Point

As far as your fan page goes, a lot of people will reach a plateau, then they’ll tell me, “You know, Faissal, I’m doing everything you tell me. I’m posting regularly and I’m engaging with likes and comments, and I’m getting as much activity as I can, but nothing much is happening.” And I will say, “Well, how many fans do you have?” and they will say 50 or 120.

That’s fine. We all have to start somewhere. It’s okay. You’ll find that these scales will tip when you reach about 500 to 1,000 fans. So your job initially is to really get momentum and promote your Facebook fan page everywhere, I’m not going to show you how to promote your page but if want, you can get your copy of the Facebook marketing secrets guide, It’s Free. So get yourself to that tipping point of 500 to 1,000. Then you’re going to see that your wall posts will get more traction, they’ll get more visibility, and they’ll get more engagement.

Lastly

Hope that you find the Complete guide about Facebook NFO or as I love to call it Facebook SEO useful and if you have any further questions about this topic “Facebook SEO ” don’t hesitate to ask by writing a comment.

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Tagged as: edge rank, edgerank, Facebook edgerank, Facebook NFO, Facebook SEO, facebook updates, facebook wall, news feed optimization, NFO

Article by Faissal Alhaithami

Entrepreneur, Social Media Specialist @Kataraqatar, gladly the founder of Fansbridge. Trainer and Keynote Speaker and the Author of Facebook marketing for smart people.

Faissal has written 53 awesome articles for us at Fans bridge blog

Twitter: @alhaithami | Facebook | Google+