A few weeks ago, I attend a webinar that aided attendees in finding fresh Facebook content and increasing your business’s outreach. Previously, I have written about how to put together your social media marketing plan, and I also mentioned that all of your content should build and engage your target social community. Content should be rich and relevant to your audience, so that you never risk losing them!

To be clear: the correct content is KING. The bottom line to make note of is that the right content leads to engagement, and engagement leads to Edgerank (which I will define for you in a bit – stay tuned.) It is also important to know that your target audience IS on Facebook, but are you reaching this audience? With relevant content, you can, but if you are not – your competitor is. Ask yourself: can you afford to ignore your potential clients? The answer for most businesses is no, so I suggest you read on… 🙂

First I would like to define the infamous word: Edgerank. Edgerank is built of three things

1. Popularity: How many likes, comments, and shares your page and posts receive.
2. Relevance: Are you talking to the correct audience, are you telling them what they want to hear? Remember: it is  always about what your audience wants. Give it to them!
3. Recency: Only posts that contain the most up to date, recent, information will be popular.

High Edgerank= high traffic. Edgerank is basically an algorithm that Facebook uses to determine if your content is drawing in views. Why does Facebook do this, you ask? Facebook is after all, a business, so they are naturally going to promote content that is drawing a lot of Facebook traffic and/or activity. Think of when a friend gets engaged or has a baby, that post is ALWAYS at the top of your feed. This is no mistake. Facebook is doing this on purpose: to suck you in. The longer you are on their site, the better it is for them. The concept to get here is this: Facebook will send you viral traffic if you have high Edgerank. This is the background behind the process: every time you post, Facebook will automatically share this content with 10-15 of your friends, and it will appear on their news feed. If those friends share or like this content, than their friends will see your post as well, Facebook notices this, hence the more engagement you receive on your posts – the more people will see them. It is a hard concept to wrap your head around at first – but it will sink in.

Here is a quick three step formula that I would like to share with you that I learned from this webinar to grow your business’s fan page:

1. Engage your audience: Send your audience content that will be buzz worthy, AKA makes them want to interact with you (like, share, comment.)
2. Get your community to take action:
   1. Ask many questions – people love sharing their opinions!
   2. Use fill in the blanks.
   3. Post photos/media that will catch your audience’s eye and draw attention.
   4. Talk about the news, a hot topic – but be careful, you never want to cause controversy.
   5. Simply ASK your audience for likes and shares, you will be surprised at the response!
   6. Talk about today in history.
3. You knew it was coming…get higher Edgerank.

To sum it all up, the more traffic you attract, the more Facebook will want to reward you for it: AKA spread your content. In order to attract more traffic, you need relevant, hot, buzz worthy content. A few last minute tips: use Google Alerts to let you know when certain key words are being used in news, it is a total time saver! Also – refer to my post about Mapping Out A Social Media Plan For Your Business – it will help you plan so you can develop and research for this content so it never becomes a stressor!

Hope you enjoyed my recap, happy marketing!

Alysia