Then Edgerank Clicked

While I was out of the office last month (on safari in Africa — yep, I did that), I was forced to do something I’ve always resisted. Since I was planning to be on another continent and without access to the internet, I set up automated posts from the blog I run at work to feed directly to our Facebook page.

I’m not a big fan of automation in social media. It’s a personal preference, I know some people swear by it; it’s just not for me. Or so I thought.

I set up the automation through our social media management software, Argyle Social (it’s awesome and relatively inexpensive if you’re looking for that kind of thing).

Image courtesy: 435digital.com

When I came back, I was stunned to find that — contrary to my expectations — more (literally hundreds more) of our page’s followers saw our blog posts while the automation was turned on than saw similar posts when I took the time to log in and  post the links directly through Facebook. It was absolutely confounding to me. Everything I’ve read suggests that my posts should gain more traction in the Facebook Edgerank algorithm if I post organically rather than through a third party service. Apparently not.

Just today I stumbled upon an infographic explaining how Edgerank works and it clicked (hat tip to Post Rocket). Forgive me if I’m late to this party, but it seems that Edgerank considers the types of posts your followers most often interact with (links, statuses, photos, videos) when it filters what they see in their news feeds.

So here’s my theory: if our page’s followers interact more often with statuses than links, it could explain how my automated posts could be seen by more people than posts created within Facebook. I was logging in and creating a link (complete with a picture and a little description of the blog post), and that made it less appealing to our page’s followers.

Long story short: I’m sticking with the automation (but only for our blog feed).

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