If you've personally been using Facebook for a while you may have noticed that some of your friends wall posts at first did not appear on your "Most Recent" wall feed.  You may have discovered them later when another friend commented on them. That's a pretty important thing to understand because the same thing happens to your company facebook page:

Just because someone has LIKED your Facebook page that does not mean that they are going to see your wall posting when you post it and they are online.

"Well, why the hell is it like that?!?!?" is the most common thing we hear when we tell clients this information.  It has to do with an algorithm that Facebook uses called "Edge Rank". According to an article in TechCrunch in the spring of 2010:

At a high level, the EdgeRank formula is fairly straightforward. But first, some definitions: every item that shows up in your News Feed is considered an Object. If you have an Object in the News Feed (say, a status update), whenever another user interacts with that Object they’re creating what Facebook calls an Edge, which includes actions like tags and comments.

According to a recent article by Facebook Diva/Expert/Guru Mari Smith:

1. Affinity = the relationship between you and each individual fan. That is, how often a fan views and interacts with your Facebook page and individual posts. Plus, how much you engage with your fans: Facebook rewards you for building relationships!
2. Weight = typically, photos receive the highest weight, followed by videos, links, status updates and apps. Manual posts receive more weight than posts by apps.
3. Time = the more recent your post, the higher your EdgeRank score. A popular piece of content will stay for a longer period of time in the News Feed of your fans.

Not being aware of this is where much of Facebook marketing efforts can fall short.  There are many companies and organizations that are now creating Facebook pages and really making some serious mistakes:  

• They tend to view Facebook as another form or one-way advertising.  They either turn off the ability for Fans to comment altogether. The "OMG, what if someone says something bad about us" or
• They segment the comments so that only their sales message shows up and other fan comments are buried

Ok, ah, you shouldn't do that. It flies in the face of what the Facebook Social platform is all about. And that's all we need to say about that.

What you should DO, now that you have a better understanding of EdgeRank, is the following:

1. Get all of your employees to LIKE your Facebook Page
2. Get your employees to occasionally LIKE your objects (wall postings)
3. Get your employees to comment on the postings; even if it's s sales message that you posted, maybe they can mention a success story... (don't let them post "oh that's interesting" or any of the other myriad of generic spam messages the "work from home" crowd post)
4. Get your customers to LIKE your page: Do you have a database of customer emails so that you could invite them to LIKE your page?
5. Encourage Sharing and reward it!
6. Encourage your customers to participate in the page via an award, discount or incentive, ...but this is really it's own topic.
7. Do it consistently.  Remember wall postings don't age like fine wine. They turn to vinegar pretty quickly.

If you found this useful, please let us know. If you have some questions, let us know that too!