WHY FACEBOOK’S GRAPH RANK MEANS SO MUCH
After attending f8 2011 in San Francisco, I am excited about the impending changes in Facebook and the News Feed is just the tip of the iceberg.
There is one change, however, that was overshadowed by the Timeline and Custom Open Graph announcements and that is the introduction of Graph Rank. Graph Rank will help determine how, when and where individuals see your content and actions.
Since the conference, I have read a handful of articles that do not address the “why” of Graph Rank’s existence, with one article stating that Graph Rank will replace EdgeRank. This could not be further from the truth. After talking to”Boz” (Andrew Bosworth, director of product) along with members of Facebook’s development team, it became apparent that Graph Rank will be the more transparent side of EdgeRank. Graph Rank makes a set of information available that represents how your community and Facebook perceive your content. This translates into reputation and ultimately affects how visible your brand messages become. If you think this sounds a bit like the sender reputations that occurred in the email world, then you’re spot on. To be clear, Graph Rank is a subset of EdgeRank and will allow Facebook as well as marketers to gather social signals. What are social signals, you ask? They are the ways people interact with your brand’s activity. A “Like” is a positive signal while reporting content as spam or hiding it from a News Feed is a negative signal. There are many other examples yet Facebook will not share exactly how they decide which activities to show nor what causes these rankings to improve or decline. The good news is that Graph Rank is going to be be composed of several quantifiable metrics. It will help determine how well your content is received by the community and what signals to keep an eye on. By following your Graph Rank, expect to receive more insight into what activities your community craves and what turns them off.
The result for your brand is increased relevancy and engagement from the people you want to interact with most.
VP Product Management, tech geek + solution guru with a background in all things permission marketing. @tjcrawford