Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm can make it difficult sometimes to reach a large number of your Facebook followers. In order to first develop a good strategy for your contests and giveaways consider better understanding EdgeRank.
Facebook’s EdgeRank was developed as a formula which determines what is displayed and how high it is displayed on the news feed. Edge is defined as pretty much anything that happens on Facebook such as a like, comment, share, check-in, etc. So the ranking of those “edges” is EdgeRank. It is determined by three very important characteristics: Affinity, Weight & Time Decay. To better develop your plan for a contest or giveaway you must better understand the affinity, weight and time decay.
Affinity can be thought of as the relationship between the user and the page. The more active the user is with your page the higher the affinity for that relationship. In other words, Facebook sees this relationship and will show more of your posts to users that care more about your brand.
Weight is the value that Facebook puts on different types of posts. A comment has a heavier weight than a like and a share has heavier weight than a comment. Each action taken on Facebook, or each edge, carries a different weight.
Time Decay is the third characteristic Facebook uses to create the EdgeRank score. The older an action is the more time decay has taken place and Facebook looks at that to determine how valuable the action is so that they will decide if that will be shown or not. The older the action is the less value it has. This is one reason why posting an effective time of day is so important. So many people post at random times when they should be scheduling posts for the most effective time of day based on your page’s insights.
Using Facebook’s EdgeRank to help you determine what to post, when to post and what type of post to create will help you when developing your strategy for a contest or giveaway. With the changes to Facebook’s contest and giveaway policy it is now much easier to post these giveaways on your Facebook page. A very popular and effective method is the ‘Tag-A-Friend’ contest. Often times the goal is to get to a specific number of likes on their Facebook page but an effective method to get there is to invite fans to comment by tagging a friend. Post reach can often soar quite high, new likes happen quickly and easily and allows the page to enjoy very nice statistics as a result. Another nice perk is that these types of giveaways can receive many shares as your fans attempt to tell many friends at once about the giveaway. Utilize Woobox and Random.Org to help with the selection of the winner for these which keeps your fans happy and makes the job easier on you!
One important tip for your Facebook contest is about the share. The title of this blog post mentions ‘share’ but that’s only because it is really one of our pet peeves. When Facebook adjusted their contest guidelines they made it really easy on us all but one of their restrictions is that you cannot select a winner based off of them sharing something. There is a very good reason for this. You cannot see all of the shares because of user’s privacy settings. Don’t tell fans that you’ll get extra entries or be selected because they share when you can’t see everyone who shared the post. A second reason, it makes you look like you have no idea what you’re doing since you cannot see all of these shares.
