Issue #27 | 1.24.2014 | 266,548 members

Facebook Edgerank: Here's How to Expand Your Reach

As a real estate agent, you fully understand the importance of expanding your reach to bring new leads into your pipeline.

As more and more agents increase their business on Facebook, you can gain a competitive edge by understanding how the site works. Your content will get seen more often and you’ll expand your reach.

Edgerank, one of Facebook’s core algorithms, is what Facebook uses to determine what gets shown in the newsfeed. This is important because users spend up to 40% of their time in the newsfeed.

Edgerank consists of three main parts— affinity, weight and time decay—and page owners control two of them.

Affinity is your relationship with fans who have liked your Facebook business page (or friended/followed your personal page). The more a fan interacts with your page, the more likely they are to see your posts. Make sure to provide your fans with meaningful, engaging content to increase the amount they see your posts.

Weight is how much priority your post is given, based upon the type of post. Facebook ranks certain types of posts higher than others because they receive more engagement. Photos, videos, and links embedded with images are ranked the highest and therefore are shown most often to fans. Use these types of media and avoid text-only posts to stay in front of your fans.

Time decay means how long your post has been on Facebook. The older your post, the less likely your post is to appear in your fans’ newsfeeds. However, this varies from user to user. Your posts’ time decay depends on how relevant your page is to any given user. Highly engaged fans who log into Facebook daily would likely see your content within hours of you posting. If those fans only logged in once a week, they could see a post of yours that is four days old. Make sure to post at least 3-4 times a week to stay visible to more of your fans.

Next time you’re on Facebook, use your Edgerank knowledge to expand your reach!

Want to learn more? Join the Social Agent Group on Facebook to discuss with real estate social media experts and fellow agents!