The publishing challenge for brands on Facebook

Jay Baer makes a telling point about the nature of the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm in a recent blog post: Companies and brands need to be “consistently good at Facebook” in order for their posts to surface in the “Top News” streams of their fans. “And that’s no gimme.”

Here’s why:

• The Top News filter displays posts based on how “interesting” or “relevant” they are, determinations that are made by the EdgeRank formula.
• One of the factors behind EdgeRank is “affinity,” or how recently and frequently users and are liking and commenting on a brand Page’s Wall posts.
• If brands publish Wall updates too infrequently, that affinity score for a majority of fans may drop.
• If brands regularly publish posts that don’t resonate with fans and generate too few likes and comments, affinity also drops.
• The fallout? Subsequent status updates from the brand become less relevant in Facebook’s calculation, and are less likely to show up in the News Feed.

I’m writing with broad brush strokes here, but the underlying nature of EdgeRank really does put the onus on brands to publish regularly (like the NBA; see screenshot above), and to create posts that inspire and compel their fans to respond.

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This post is part of an ongoing “31 Days of Facebook Marketing” series from LiveWorld, a social media agency that offers moderation, insight, and community programming Facebook services for Fortune 1000 brands.