To improve your company’s performance on Facebook, whether your goal is to generate leads or “likes”, you’ve got to get your posts seen – a job that’s easier said than done.

Reason: It’s hard to get your posts to appear in users’ News Feeds because of EdgeRank, Facebook’s algorithm for determining how high your messages appear in feeds.

If your posts don’t show up in the top 2-3% of all the posts that get filtered into users’ News Feeds, odds are they’ll never be seen except by the few who actually travel to your Facebook page.

So your No. 1 goal on Facebook is to improve your EdgeRank score enough to crack that 2-3%. The higher your score, the more important Facebook will believe your posts to be and the higher they’ll appear in users’ feeds.

Pleasing EdgeRank

EdgeRank uses a few measures to assign a score to your posts:

• Affinity Score
• Post Weight, and
• Time Decay.

Affinity Score

You’re Affinity Score is based on how much you interact with a particular friend or fan in your network. The more mutual friends you have, the higher your Affinity Score. The more that person tends to click on, comment on, share or “like” your posts, the higher your Affinity Score.

It’s important to know that comments and “shares” are worth way more than “likes” because they require a higher level of engagement.

So the more a friend/fan comments on your posts, the higher your posts will appear in that person’s News Feed.

Post Weight

Your Post Weight score is based on the type of content you’re posting and how much others are commenting on, sharing and “liking” it.

Pictures and videos get much higher scores, because Facebook has determined users tend to engage more with them than text posts.

So if you’re posting a picture or a video, it’s much more likely to appear in users’ feeds.
In fact, Facebook puts so much stock in pictures that it spent $1 billion to purchase the photo-sharing app Instagram. That sent a clear message Facebook loves visual content.

Three photo-sharing tips:

• Use them with everything. Make sure all your posts, even brief status updates, include a photo.
• Post charts and infographics. It doesn’t have to be a traditional point-and-shoot photo to grab friends’/fans’ attention.
• Take ’em behind the scenes. What does your production line look like? Who’s answering the phones? Show your friends/fans.

Time Decay

Time Decay score is based simply on how old a post is. As it gets older, the more its EdgeRank score diminishes, eventually making it fall out of users’ feeds.

What you can do now

So to recap, here’s what you can do to increase your EdgeRank score and, ultimately, your performance on Facebook:

• Post lots of photos and videos that will get your friends/fans to click, comment on, share and “like” them.
• Ask questions. Why questions? Because they’re a natural way to generate comments, which will boost your EdgeRank score.

As you build friend/fan interaction across your posts, you’ll begin to show up more and more in users’ feeds.
Unfortunately, Facebook Insights, the site’s analytics platform won’t reveal your EdgeRank score. But there are some third-party tools, like EdgeRank Checker, that will.

Author Bio:
Christian Schappel is the Editor-in-Chief of The Internet & Marketing Report newsletter, which is published by Progressive Business Publications (PBP) to provide marketers with news, research and ideas to help them increase revenue. Connect with Progressive Business Publications on LinkedIn or Glassdoor.