The advent of social networking tools & specially Facebook has changed the arena of online marketing.
Brands & websites which were worried about getting higher page ranks in popular search engines have now one more challenge which is popularly called as NFO – News Feed Optimization (in relevance to Facebook News Feed page).
Earlier a significant amount of online advertising budget of various online sites used to go to Search Engine Marketing initiatives, but now marketing managers also have to allocate money for one more channel which is called NFM – News Feed Marketing.
SEO | NFO |
SEO is all about making Google and the other search engines think that you’re authoritative on a given topic and deserve to be listed highly in its search results | Whereas NFO is making Facebook think that the Feed items published from your application are more relevant to your followers & hence should be displayed in their News Feeds. |
SEM | NFM |
SEM is all about paying Google and the other search engines for some particular keywords so to put your site link on the search result pages of those particular keywords | NFM is paying Facebook to insert your ad next to Feed items that it thinks are important or relevant to your product/service & to a very targeted audience who might have interest in it. |
Until now people Search Engines were the most important tool to get visibility to users but not anymore. Social networking websites hold a very important place in their lives as social sites are where people spend most of their time.
People spend 3x time on Facebook than Google.
For any marketer NFM is relatively easier to do as for this he/she just need to pay Facebook & they’ll put the News Feed at relevant places & guarantee a very certain quantity of guaranteed traffic.
But News Feed Optimization is a bit trickier & needs a lot more efforts & energy. Similarly to Google’s page rank algorithm, Facebook also has its own NewsFeed algorithm or an EdgeRank algorithm, which is not completely disclosed to public.
At a high level, the EdgeRank formula is fairly straightforward.
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.
NFO Edge Rank = ∑edges e uewede
where
ue – affinity score between viewing user & edge creator
we – weight for this edge type (create, comment, like, tag, etc.)
de – time decay factor based on how long ago the edge was created
Moreover, gaming the News Feed is going to be harder than gaming Google’s PageRank algorithm because of the personalized nature of Feed item selection. Because so many components of FeedRank depend on individual user behavior, there is only so much you can do as an application developer to boost your Feed item’s score across the board.
The best one can do is to design rich, engaging Feed items that convert well & are viral in nature.
Over & above it there are various Feed item elements like title, body & images which should be optimized & made really interesting. Also the feed application should be designed in such a way that it leads to some sort of provocative action from the user & make him install & share the application.
Well in my personal opinion, the battle for News Feed Optimization has yet to take its true colors as marketers are still struggling to use Facebook as an effective marketing tool for their products & services. But of course as a smart marketer, one must be aware of the nitty gritties of this field.
