For the increasing number of brands developing their social media platforms, 2010 and 2011 can be broadly defined as years of acquisition and engagement.

Acquisition rates in 2010 skyrocketed as brands became dedicated to fan-growth; Coca-Cola now boasts 23.5 million fans on their Facebook platform alone. Engagement however, is not as straightforward and requires a more strategic understanding or brands risk undermining their hard fought acquisition campaigns.

With large audiences of fans and followers, the question of their value is frequently answered by the simple word engagement.  Few would deny there is value in engaging with the audience and it is deemed critical to a successful brand platform, being the key measurement criteria for success.

However, engagement on this scale will only get brands so far.  Thanks to the new Facebook algorithm EdgeRank, engagement is now a measurable science, rather than a ‘nice to have’.   If brands are not engaging fans with relevant content, then effectively, their hard earned audience will stop seeing their communiqués.

So, what is the science behind it? Essentially, the EdgeRank algorithm decides which posts or updates issued by brands appear in the user’s Top News stream. Working around three measurement criteria, the algorithm tailors the stream according to content deemed appropriate for each user.

Whereas the Most Recent stream delivers the vast majority of user posts in chronological order from the user’s friends and chosen fan pages (such as a brand site), the Top News stream is the default –  and the EdgeRank algorithm conducts this customisation on behalf of the user. It orders the displayed posts according to the three main criteria: affinity, weight and time. In short, this means that if brands are not playing by the rules of EdgeRank, fewer and fewer of their audience will see their updates.

EdgeRank assigns a score to each individual post and page.  Brands should be looking to ensure they are achieving the highest scores possible through linking to other parts of Facebook or the web using the native embed link tool within the network, which will result in a post not being penalised – whereas linking to the same place more than once using the embed link tool will result in significantly less impressions for future posts linking to the same place.

Similarly, links from Facebook posts to other areas within the environment are viewed preferentially in terms of EdgeRank when compared to links to external sites and will result in a post having a higher visibility. However, links to external sites do still offer some benefit in terms of EdgeRank scores, against posts with no links.

By understanding the science, brands can ensure they are doing all that they can to optimise their audience engagement.  However, this is purely theory at present and in the world of social media, that can change very quickly.

Calum Brannan is co-founder of CrowdControlHQ.

Tags: calum brannan, edgerank, engagement, facebook, science