Facebook uses a complex algorithm to calculate which posts should appear at the top of your News Feed, or even in your feed at all. If your business uses Facebook to market to your customers, you’ll want to learn more about this algorithm called EdgeRank to ensure your posts are being seen by your followers.

It’s a complex math calculation but using it to your advantage is an easy thing to do. You just need to be aware of it, and post things that will help your status updates be seen so they can work as hard as they can for you.

You work hard on keeping your Facebook Page up to date for your business and post regular updates for your list of followers. But if you aren’t posting the right material, Facebook may be hindering your ability to be seen. They use the formula below to calculate the importance of each post and decide what will be most relevant for you, putting the more important posts at the top of your News Feed.

Affinity

This score is based on your activity with a certain person or page. If you visit their page often, comment on their posts regularly, and like their content, their posts are more likely to appear higher on your News Feed. Therefore, if someone interacts with your content on your Facebook Company Page often, your content will be more likely to appear in their feed.

Weight

This is based on the activity for a certain post. If it has a lot of comments and likes, it gets to be higher and more important in the feed.

Time

This one is easy, if a post has been around longer, it’s less important so Facebook moves it down on the list, even if it has tons of likes and comments.

What does this mean for you?

Make sure that you’re posting things that are relevant for your users, things they will want to comment on, and share with their friends. Try to encourage conversation and promote sharing your content. People are on Facebook to have fun and interact with others so it’s a natural thing for them to do, you just need to encourage them to do that with your material too.

Helpful Tip: On your own Facebook News Feed, you can click Most Recent instead of Top News (at the top of the page) in order to see all the most recent posts instead of what Facebook thinks you want to see.

The best thing to do is to play around with different techniques. Try different types of posts to see what your audience is interested in and what might encourage them to interact with you. Ask questions, create polls, post pictures. There are tons of ways to get your community involved, and this will help your fanbase grow larger as well.

What types of posts do you find work best for your Company Page?