Why Edgerank Rocks and Mark Cuban is Wrong

Did you realize that not every post from your Facebook friends appears on your every updating newsfeed? Even though it makes sense that stories I interact with are highlighted on my news feed, I didn’t know that a majority of them didn’t even make it to the feed at all.

But now I know, and I have found that Facebook’s Edgerank is the reason why.

According to Facebook, Edgerank is an algorithm used by them to determine where and what posts appear on each individual user’s news feed so that they see the most relevant and wanted content.

There are three variables that make up the Edgerank post ranking algorithm: affinity, weight, and decay.

Affinity score is based on the relationship you have with the user who created the post. The more interconnected you are with that person, the more likely their story is to appear on your news feed.

Weight measures and ranks what type of engagement a post is getting. For example, shares and comments require more effort to post than a simple “like” and therefore are higher ranked interactions.

Decay factors in how long ago the post was posted and how much recent interaction it has had. A post will generally disappear from the newsfeed after a certain amount of time unless it has had recent engagement.

So if you want your posts to appear in your followers newsfeeds as often as possible, you need to consider it’s content and whether or not your followers will engage with it.

When it all comes down to it, Interactive, relevant content = quality content. Naturally, the way to build social authority on the internet is by sharing content. Naturally, posts that link to relevant, helpful content are of higher value than those that don’t. And while developing quality content is important, it is just as important what you do with that content that gives it a high Edgerank. To ensure your post are quality, check out These 7 Good practices from Social Backers to make your Edgerank soar!

1. QUALITY CONTENT – Since EdgeRank directly relates to your Engagement Rates, the more engaging your posts are, the more people will see it, and your affinity will continue to increase.

2. FOLLOW THE RULES – Breaking the rules has only short-term benefits. The more people report your Page, the more Facebook will penalize your Page which can result in a rapid drop in future reach and cost you the reputation of your brand.

3. POST FORMAT – Photos and videos have proven to engage most users, but a link to a great story or a clever status can do the job as well. Use Facebook savvy by not creating too long posts, take advantage of questions and call to actions, play with words and fill in blanks,…

4. POST FREQUENCY – More than 90% of Fans never come back to visit the Facebook Page again after Liking it. You want to post enough to maintain fan relationships, but not so much that they are overwhelmed.

5. POST TIMING – You need to find out when your audience generates the most activity. With Analytics PRO, you can easily track your most engaging days of the week and hours of the day to optimize your posting strategy based on previous results.

6. RESPONDING TO FANS – Do not forget that social media is a two-way channel. Avoid overwhelming them with advertisements, and create open communication. Every time you respond to a fan, not only are you investing in an actual brand-customer relation but you are also investing in the affinity of his/her Friends.

7. KEEP AN OPEN MIND! Measure, analyze, and optimize your strategy, analyze your competitors’, and try different techniques that work for others. Understand that Fans’ behavior will change just as frequently as the Facebook algorithm does.

These principles apply to businesses as well as individual users. However, businesses need to ensure that they are careful to represent themselves in as humanistic of a way as possible in order to be best connect with individuals. Social web sharing companies like Facebook and Google want the best experience possible for the core of their users, people. No one likes to be spammed. This why Facebook and Google focus on tailoring their algorithm towards showing users content they most care about, not what their followed businesses want them to care about. The key to giving people what they care about is authenticity. Companies will reach more people when their content is motivated by relevance and authenticity rather than profit.

This article  shows the idea of NFO and NFM (News Feed Optimization and News Feed Marketing). The ideas and strategies involved with these two fields are very similar to SEO and SEM as with Google’s algorithm. Both within Facebook and through Google, providing a high level of high quality, authentic content will give you the best chance of it being seen by your followers.

However, just sharing good content based on Edgerank score will not guarantee that a follower sees your post. Because Facebook only shows the most relevant content for each individual user, a lot of stories and posts get lost in the flow of the newsfeed or are never shown at all. This article states that “the average news feed story from a user profile reaches just 12 percent of their friends.” With this narrow reach of content towards friends, and most users having hundreds of “liked” businesses and organizations, it it hard for either type of user to reach a significant portion of their followers with their posts. Of course, the more you pay Facebook, the more reach you can have. But surely, if you want to ensure that every follower of your page sees your post, you are going to have to pay them a lot. Especially if you are a big company, like one represented by Mark Cuban.

Mark has recently recently criticized Facebook on Twitter and his blog for their extremely large costs of advertising to a wide audience. He doesn’t agree with the large amount of money a company has to pay to reach a significant portion of an audience. An article from Wired posts Cuban as saying, “Why would we invest in extending our Facebook audience size if we have to pay to reach them?” Cuban told ReadWrite. “That’s crazy.”

Ryan Tate from Wired goes on to say, “…the huge number of users Cuban wants to reach aren’t on Tumblr or MySpace, where posts are unfiltered; they’re on Facebook, where Cuban and his staff have to work harder – or pay more – to get in people’s faces. In his comments on Twitter and to ReadWrite, it doesn’t seem to occur to Cuban that Facebook users like that the social network quietly filters some Mavericks posts from their feeds. It’s not like unfiltered Mavericks promotional copy is particularly hard to find. If Cuban wants to get mad at someone for keeping his content obscure, he should blame the people who write it or the people who refuse to enthusiastically consume it – not Facebook for accurately labeling it as advertorial, and pricing its distribution accordingly.”

Mark doesn’t realize that people actually don’t care as much about clicking on sponsored posts as he thinks (orly?). The reason why people don’t want your posts, Mark, and why you have to pay to have them seen by your followers, is because they are mostly intrusive and unwanted (even if helpful. Think the light yellow sponsored posts at the top of a Google search result). If a company’s post was wanted to be seen by a user, then it would be, because that user has positively interacted with that company’s content in the past. The more they do, the more those posts will organically appear on a user’s newsfeed. Thanks Facebook algorithm.

“In response to this criticism (from Mark Cuban), Facebook explained–both in a post by one of its engineers and in comments to TechCrunch and Ars Technica–that the newsfeed filtering was designed to eliminate spam and noise and that it was constantly being tweaked to show users things they were actually interested in, not just things that brands wanted them to see. The message seemed pretty obvious: Don’t be spammy with your posts, and lots of your users will still see them for free. And if you want to spam them anyway, you will have to pay for sponsored posts to do that.” Good content is hard to develop. Edgerank gives the little guy a chance to be seen. As long as you have good content, not even money from the big guys can hide away your posts from your followers.

But not only does Mark have a problem with the way content is shown on Facebook, he is also critical of the content itself that is generated. He describes FB in his blog as “…a time waster. That’s not to say we don’t engage, we do. We click, share and comment because it’s mindless and easy.  But for some reason FB doesn’t seem to want to accept that it’s best purpose in life is as a huge time suck platform that we use to keep up with friends, interests and stuff.  I think that they are over thinking what their network is all about.”

The problem Mark, is not that Facebook doesn’t want to accept it’s role as “time waste central” of the internet, but it is that you, and the data you are sourcing, are trying to put them there as such. People spend all sorts of types of time on all sorts of types of content on Facebook. Some items on a person’s news feed may indeed be garble. But most importantly, the collective of information a user sees comes from their community in which is important to them regardless. Their content comes from people they have physically connected with, similar peers with similar friends, local, like-minded students, parents, siblings, local businesses. As Mark Cuban also says, “by default you are not going to use your newsfeed as a primary source of information. It’s more like the township newspaper .  You get the basic local stuff and updates , but it can’t be a comprehensive source.” Mark is right, Facebook is not a comprehensive news source. It is like a township newspaper, as he says.

Facebook is not meant to be a comprehensive source. It is not meant to be a go to stop to find out what great deal we can get from Coca Cola that day, or pressing issues of poverty in any given state or nation. We see those types of stories everywhere. From print ads, to radio, to tv and internet commercials. We get enough of that stuff from all types of different sources.

Facebook is about personal community and connection. So, if those large companies you represent, Mark, can’t afford to continue spamming every single user, every single day, who happened have liked one of those pages, boo hoo, get over it. Thanks again, Facebook Algorithm.

This is the beauty of Edgerank. No matter how a large a company is or many advertising dollars they have, they won’t be able to continue to reach followers who don’t like them. Mark also has a problem with this aspect of Edgerank because he believes that if a person really doesn’t want to see someone’s posts, they will simply hide them from their news feeds themselves. He says, “…Facebook is over complicating a simple issue.  A user can govern his/her newsfeed far better by hitting unlike than an algorithm like EdgeRank ever can.”

Yes, in theory, a person can decide better than an algorithm the type of content they want to see. However this simple “blocking” of a user is not as simple as he puts it. First of all, we don’t want to take the large amount of time that it does to  moderate every single person and business for good content.  Secondly, there is a deeper, unseen relationship between a Facebook user and their friends as he may realize. In a users township of friends, you may not always necessarily like everyone in it,  but you want and need them around because the content they share is an alternate, maybe sometimes extreme, but valuable, view of life that you think is important to consider once in a while in order to make effective and rational decisions in your own life. Some of what these people or businesses post is garble. But some is not. Some of it may be valuable to you. So naturally, you don’t want to see all of this person’s posts, but you want enough to be able to check in on them. And that is why Edgerank rocks. Person or business, only good content will be seen by those who want to see it most. And that is why the internet rocks and will continue to get better. Only good content will be seen by those who want to see it most

And that, my friends, is the point. Good content, that is relevant, personal, and authentic, will always win. And that’s awesome, because this is the type of content that is the best means for increasing the good of humanity, not profits. Sorry Mark.

The Death of Paid Advertising

The problem with paid media.

It isn’t taken seriously. It is untrusted. It is forced upon us. In general, we do not like it. It is seen as an interruption rather than an invitation. It is seen as “not for me” instead of “just what I was looking for.” No one wants to be told what to do.

But give a person a reason and a will to join you, and you will then have more than just a customer, but a you will have a friend. A friend who won’t be afraid to be honest with you because he realizes that there are plenty of other good friends out there that he could go hang out with if you don’t treat him right. Honesty is the best policy. Good content, once seen, will not be ignored or forgotten. Every good bit you share helps. The better the content you produce and share, the more authority you will have, and the higher the likelihood you will have to fuel organic sharing of it.

People don’t see and hear about Redbull everyday because of their television and print advertisements. They hear about them because they put out kick ass videos, on the daily, that are informative, entertaining, and inspiring. The people in their videos aren’t drinking Red Bull, but Red Bull represents the lifestyle of the people. Being friends with Red Bull is like being a kid with the most awesome older brother who does the coolest things and one day you want to be able to do cool things like him and see the world a little more like he sees it so you go and drink a Red Bell every morning before you take on the world like your cool older bro does. People don’t buy what you make, they buy why you make it.

Check out what Red Bull has put out in anticipation for their 1 year anniversary of the Stratos project.

Paid media is like a fishing reel reaching out trying to sneakily lure in a sea of customers with some “too good to be true” bait, whereas your owned and earned media are like the happy light at the end of the tunnel that leads to endless possibilities.

Red Bull paid millions of dollars to allow Felix Baumgartner to step off that platform from the far reaches of the stratosphere. Every step of the way, Red Bull used social media as a main channel of communication to followers of the project. Doing so gave people awesome content so good that many of them will buy the documentary that has come out. And they have been drinking Red Bull up to and ever since. All of their advertising through social media was made available for free. You don’t need to pay to get someone to see your advertisement. You just need to make it good enough and visible enough for people to find it themselves. That is what gives your brand loyalty. That is what gives you real power.

How Great Companies Inspire Action Through Inbound Marketing

Some business do not believe or truly understand the power of inbound marketing.Those who don’t may say, “inbound marketing tactics are sound too expensive, it would be much cheaper for my business to keep sending out direct mail.” What these companies don’t realize is that inbound marketing strategies may be more expensive upfront, but will ultimately give you a much higher ROI in your tactics. “Twice as many marketers say inbound marketing delivers below average cost per leads versus outbound strategies. Our survey found that 34% of all the leads generated in 2013 come from inbound marketing sources. In fact, inbound delivers 54% more leads into the marketing funnel than traditional outbound leads.”1

“It’s about creating marketing people love: inbound marketing.”2 I really like this statement from Hubspot’s 2013 inbound marketing annual report. Connecting with your customers should not be an annoying experience for them. It should be one that is welcomed. A customer should want to approach what you have to offer because they see a part of themselves in what you create and provide.

        

Having the customer come to you through inbound marketing is ideally what the idea of marketing is all about. And that is to build real relationships with people. Relationships are of the utmost importance to a business because ones that are well kept will lead your followers to continue doing business with you. And they should want to do business with you not only because you provide something they need or want, but because the values you show and the content you put out personally resonates with them.

(The title of the email says: “‘Into the Mind’ wins Film of the Year; now available o iTunes and more”)

The content of this email from Freeskier magazine is a great example of inbound marketing. Freeskier magazine is a ski magazine very similar to other popular ones like “Powder”, “Ski”, and “Skiing”. Even though almost all of Freeskier’s revenue comes from magazine sales, this email they sent me is highlighting a new ski movie in which has come out recently, I would probably enjoy, and that they are unaffiliated with other than the fact that both parties are in the ski industry. So, while Freeskier will not gain any direct revenue by me being interested in this film, they know that by informing me of it, they will better be able to build a relationship with me through common interest. Since I am appreciative of Freeskier doing this for me, I will be much more likely in the future to support their magazine either by buying it in a store or subscribing to it from their website.

“What’s exciting to all of us at HubSpot is that marketers today understand that inbound is not just a set of tactics but an ideology and framework for how businesses will find customers in the next decade.” To me, this statement says, business’ should no longer attempt to trick or inconveniently trap customers in order to get business. We instead need to shift our marketing ideals so that we are the good guys people want to hang out with, not just the guys people go to because they need something in which after they get it, may or may not call upon you again. From the wise words of Simon Sinek, a author best known for popularizing the idea of the “Golden Circle”,  “People don’t buy what you make, they buy why you make it.”

Let the Spiders Crawl with Good SEM

As search engine algorithms become better and better at finding specific answers to customers’ queries, a web designer must be able to know what information the search engine will be looking for and where it will be looking for it when it browses through relevant data on your site to potentially post up as a result to a query.

As more information becomes available on the internet, relevant data available for any type of query increases. So if you happened to be the only ice cream shop in Bellingham, and someone were to search “ice cream in Bellingham”, more likely than not, your business would come up as the first listing on the results page. But if someone else were to open an ice cream shop in Bellingham, and their website was optimized better than yours to tell a search engine that they sell ice cream in Bellingham, say because they have the words “ice cream” and “Bellingham” both at the very top of their page, that company’s website is going to be ranked higher than yours. Because of this, when someone searches “”ice cream in Bellingham”, they are going to be much more likely to go to your competitors shop to buy ice cream possibly regardless of quality or location (say, for a tourist, or someone who was not already heavily invested into the already established ice cream shop).

Especially in the case of sold goods that have no striking differences in quality or appearance, SEM is key. “The top listing in Google’s organic search results receives 33 percent of the traffic, compared to 18 percent for the second position, and the traffic only degrades from there.”1

The high percentage of people who click on the first or second links of a results page shows the importance of making sure that your business’ website comes up highly ranked and visible when relevant.

However being able to be found on the internet is only half the battle when it comes to effective SEM. The increase of people realizing the importance of community in business is driving businesses to provide great content on their sites. “People want to know whom they are dealing with. Your customers are checking for your website, location, map or directions, social media links, contact information, hours and even a photo of the owner or staff. Your customers want to see who they are doing business with. They want to be able to visit your business location even before they step foot through your door.”2 Customers are demanding more. They want more information, and they want to be able to find what is relevant to them more easily. If a business wants to continue to be successful, they must give the customer what they want, and SEM has just the tools to make that happen.

There is no doubt that growth in SEM will continue. As more people use the internet to find intimate information, businesses will need to make sure that theirs is available. The websites with the most relevant and revealed information will win customers. And as long as business want to attract more customers, SEM will be a most useful idea.

Sources:

1http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2276184/No.-1-Position-in-Google-Gets-33-of-Search-Traffic-Study

2http://www.newwindmarketing.com/why-is-search-engine-marketing-important/