This is a guest post by Brian Solis 

Facebook recently introduced the ability for brands to increase reach for important posts and updates, but that reach comes at a cost. The prices varies depending on how many fans you have in your community. This new feature coincided with changes to the company’s Edgerank algorithm, which is how Facebook automagically filters posts in and out of your stream. Similar to how Google’s PageRank sorts results to better match your search intention, Facebook uses Edgerank to ensure that engagement is optimized and spam is minimized.

Following these events, many marketers and business executives have claimed a sharp decrease in unpaid post reach. Naturally, accusations of greed and corruption were hurled at Facebook as marketers believed that Facebook’s sole motive for this update was to force brands into a paid position to guarantee reach.

The controversy hit new heights when billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban launched an offensive charging Facebook with a shakedown and thus threatening to move all of his community efforts to other social networks.

“FB is blowing it!” Cuban howled in a Tweet. He continued with a warning Facebook, one that he’s pursuing, “This is the first step. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or the new Myspace as [sic] primary site.” He shared a telling screenshot in his Tweet of the Mavericks’s Facebook page showing a cost of $3,000 to reach one million of the team’s 2.3 million fans. If you do the math however, you’ll see the potential PPM of that equation is more than reasonable at $0.003 per person. Unfortunately, many experts missed this point.

The pile on continued though. We Are Social, a social media agency, and Socialbakers, developing of social network monitoring and tracking tools for analysis published findings that showed the average, organic post reach had dropped by 40 percent following the update to EdgeRank.

So, is overall organic post reach down?

Yes.

Is overall spam down as a result?

Yes.

Did Facebook purposefully change its EdgeRank algorithm to reduce reach and sell more ads?

Hardly.

If everyone reacted in similar fashion to Mark Cuban, not only would the business lose, fans lose as well. This is something I examined at length following GM’s famous pullout of its Facebook advertising budget earlier in 2012.

EdgeRank Explained

It’s important to understand how EdgeRank works before passing judgment or sparking fruitless debates. Whether you’re leading a paid, earned, or owned strategy, making informed decisions about goals and proper metrics starts with knowing the real challenges and opportunities.

In all honesty, Facebook should do a better job helping businesses understand not only EdgeRank, but how to better leverage the network as a whole in ways that are more meaningful for businesses and the community at large. But, we have to start somewhere.

In a post entitled, “News Feed, Engagement, and Promoted Posts: How They Work,” Facebook Ad Engineer Philip Zigoris aimed to bust myths while educating marketers. It tells the story of engagement and optimization:

Monitoring what types of posts are getting good responses is key, and always has been. UsePage Insights to determine what types of content – videos, posts, questions, etc. – are getting good engagement versus what types aren’t. Take a look at our Page Publishing Guide for posting best practices, and make sure to use our Page post targeting features so that you reach the audiences most likely to respond to your messages. And for posts that you see are getting a lot of responses, you can promote them to extend your reach to more news feeds.

What are the underlying EdgeRank factors that define whether or not someone sees a post in the news feed?

1) Facebook looks at whether or not you’ve previously interacted with an author’s posts or whether or not your friends are engaging around those posts.

2) If content is or isn’t engaged by your social graph and the network at large affects what you see and what you don’t see.

3) EdgeRank also examines whether or not your have interacted with similar types of posts in the past, i.e. photos, videos, polls, etc.

4) If content or page hosts have received complaints by other users, chances are that you will not see it.

Social Media Optimization is the New SEO

Engagement is the key to amplifying reach.

The debate unfortunately masks a much more important and productive discussion. Businesses confuse Facebook as a utility or service that’s there to help broadcast messages much in the same way businesses pay wire services to distribute press releases or brands buy advertisements on TV or radio to reach as many people as possible. Facebook is a social network to help people communicate, share, and discover. With over one billion people calling Facebook one of their digital homes, a social economy is a natural byproduct. Therefore, businesses must learn that relationships are earned and earned again and communities are built upon a foundation of mutual value, entertainment, and empowerment.

A like isn’t an opt in or subscription for marketing spam. It is an expression not a representation of a captive audience. Regardless of your community size, people are not idly waiting for your marketing messages. The reality is that only a small fraction of your overall community will see your posts. People may have Like’d you, but they’re also following friends, family, other brands and important organizations and events. With everyone publishing content, you’re competing for attention in real-time. Instead, consider competing for attention with the right content at the right-time.

Approach EdgeRank with a philosophy of contributing relevance to merit resonance. You can increase reach by optimizing posts, whether paid or organic, through social media optimization (SMO). If engagement drives reach, then design content to not just be consumable, but also shareable. Likes, comments, shares, tags, and so on, spark a social effect and extend the life and volume of your updates. Simply publishing or paying for each without considering shareability or SMO is done so in vain.

This is true for any social network.

Whether you pay to play or you invest in organic engagement, the intention behind each strategy must be the same. Be relevant. Make it count. By striving for relevance, you will increase probability for resonance, which will over time contribute to your EdgeRank significance.

This story was originally published on BrianSolis.com

Brian Solis is a principal analyst at Altimeter Group. He is also an award-winning author, prominent blogger, and keynote speaker.

Brian’s blog is ranked in the top 10 marketing blogs in the AdAge Power 150 and is also a Top 100 business blog as ranked by Technorati. In addition to his writing and research, Brian is the host of the annual Pivot Conference where brands, agencies, and experts come together to address challenges and opportunities in new media.

But notorious content farm Demand Media — who some think that Google was specifically targeting with its update — seems unfazed by the news. The site is best known for churning out tons of content aimed specifically at search engines — hence the term content farm.

Google says its algorithm improvement “noticeably impacts 11.8 percent” of queries. It describes low-quality sites as those “which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.” Those sites’ rankings will go down, while high-quality sites that feature “original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, [and] thoughtful analysis” will rise.

In a blog post, Demand’s EVP of media and operations Larry Fitzgibbon seemed overly understanding of Google’s need to improve the consumer searching experience. “We have built our business by focusing on creating the useful and original content that meets the specific needs of today’s consumer,” he said. “So naturally we applaud changes search engines make to improve the consumer experience – it’s both the right thing to do and our focus as well.”

Fitzgibbon went on to say that Demand’s content library saw some ups and downs following Google’s algorithm change. “It’s impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long-term – but at this point in time, we haven’t seen a material net impact on our Content & Media business,” he said.

In its first earnings call as a public company, Demand’s chief executive Richard Rosenblatt defended the company’s reputation. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t consider the site a content farm.

Google says that it isn’t relying on feedback from the new Personal Blocklist Chrome extension for the algorithm changes. But in a comparison between the Blocklist data and the sites flagged by the new algorithm, Google found that the algorithm change addresses 84 percent of the most-blocked domains by users of the extension. That’s a big confirmation that the algorithm changes will be mostly beneficial to users, even though some companies may be hurt in the process.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

It’s a popular notion these days Google has lost its “mojo” due to failed products like Google Wave, Google Buzz, and Google TV. But Google’s core business — Web search — has come under fire recently for being the ultimate in failed tech products.

I can only ask: What took so long? I first blogged about Google’s increasingly terrible search results in October 2007. If you search for any topic that is monetizable, such as “iPod Connectivity” or “Futon Filling”, you will see pages and pages of search results selling products and very few that actually answer your query. In contrast, if you search for something that isn’t monetizable, say “bridge construction,” it is like going 10 years back into a search time machine.

Search has been increasingly gamed by link and content farms year by year, and users have been frogs slowly getting boiled in water without realizing it. (Bing has similarly bad results, a testament to Microsoft’s quest to copy everything Google.)

But here’s what these late-blooming critics miss: Yes, Google’s search results do indeed suck. But Google’s fixing it.

The much acclaimed PageRank algorithm, which ranks search results based on the highest number of inbound links, has failed since it’s easy for marketers to overwhelm the number of organic links with a bunch of astroturfed links. Case in point: The Google.com page that describes PageRank is #4 in the Google search results for the term PageRank, below two vendors that are selling search engine marketing.

Facebook, which can rank content based on the number of Likes from actual people rather than the number of inbound links from various websites, can now provide more relevant hits, and in realtime since it does not have to crawl the web. A Like is registered immediately. No wonder Facebook scares Google.

But the secret to Google’s success was actually not PageRank, although it makes for a good foundation myth. The now-forgotten AltaVista, buried within Yahoo and due to be shut down, actually returned great results by employing the exact opposite of PageRank, and returned pages that were hubs and had links to related content.

Google’s secret was that it could scale infinitely on low-cost hardware and was able to keep up with the Internet’s exponential growth, while its competitors such as AltaVista were running on expensive, big machines running processors like the DEC Alpha. When the size of the Web doubled, Google could cheaply keep up on commodity PC hardware, and AltaVista was left behind. Cheap and expandable computing, not ranking Web pages, is what Google does best. Combine that with an ever-expanding data set, based on people’s clicks, and you have a virtuous circle that keeps on spinning.

The folks at Google have not been asleep at the wheel. They are well aware that their search results were being increasingly gamed by search marketers and that this was not a battle they were going to win. The answer has been to dump the famous blue links on which Google built its business.

Over the past couple of years, Google has progressively added vertical search results above its regular results. When you search for the weather, businesses, stock quotes, popular videos, music, addresses, airplane flight status, and more, the search results of what you are looking for are  presented immediately. The vast majority of users are no longer clicking through pages of Google results: They are instantly getting an answer to their question:

Google is in the unique position of being able to learn from billions and billions of queries what is relevant and what can be verticalized into immediate results. Google’s search value proposition has now transitioned to immediately answering your question, with the option of sifting through additional results. And that’s through a combination of computing power and accumulated data that competitors just can’t match.

For those of us who have watched this transition closely and attentively over the past few years, it has been an amazing feat that should be commended. So while I am the first to make fun of Google’s various product failures, Google search is no longer one of them.