If you’re a brand, or if you manage social media for a brand, you’ve probably noticed a big drop off in the number of fans you reach with each individual Facebook post. While many brands were surprised to find that 100% of their Facebook posts weren’t seen by 100% their fans, most could count on their posts appearing on the pages of somewhere around 56% of their fans at any given time.

All that changed this Fall, when EdgeRank, the algorithm Facebook uses to determine what posts users see in their newsfeed, changed its formula, resulting in a 40% drop-off, on average, in the number of fans who saw a brand’s post at any given time. While brands and brand managers scrambled to figure out to how combat the drop-off in reach, Facebook found itself having to defend charges that it changed EdgeRank in order to force brands to spend money to “promote” their Facebook posts, thereby getting their status updates back in front of a higher percentage of their fans.

No matter Facebook’s motivation in changing the EdgeRank algorithm, the fact is that the current formula isn’t going away any time soon. Luckily, the formula used by EdgeRank is widely known (Weight x Affinity x Time Decay = a posts’s EdgeRank score), and there are some easy things your brand can do to push your posts’ EdgeRank scores higher. The higher your post’s EdgeRank score, the higher percentage of your fans that will see your post.

With that in mind, here are five thing your can do to increase your EdgeRank Scores:

1) Vary the type of content (weight): The first factor EdgeRank takes into account is how often an individual fan interacts with the kind of content you’ve posted. Immediately following EdgeRank’s algorithm change, it appeared that photos were valued more highly than other types of posts, but straight text posts and links have been make a surge as of late. Brands should make sure to vary the kinds of posts to determine which kinds of updates get the most traction with their fans.

2) Vary the times of posts (time decay): Another big factor in the EdgeRank algorithm is time decay: the amount of time between an update is posted and a fan of a brand logs on to see the post. The older a post is, the lower it’s EdgeRank score will be. For this reason, it’s important to experiment with posting at different times of day. Once you know the optimal time of day to post to reach the greatest amount of fans, the better chance you have of increasing your posts’ visibility.

3) Target posts to your demographic (affinity): The third factor in EdgeRank’s formula is affinity. Simply put, affinity is the number of times a fan has interacted via likes, shares, and comments, with your posts. The more often a fan engages with your brand, the more likely she is to see your posts popping up in her timeline. In order to encourage fans to engage with a post, you need to make sure your brand is pushing out content that is targeted and of interest to your fan base. Lack of interest in a brand’s content leads to lack of engagement with a brand’s posts. For example, fashion brands shouldn’t be posting content about model cars, and model car makers shouldn’t push out content on the latest line of Jimmy Choo’s. Know your fan base and give them what they want.

4) Ask for what you want: While EdgeRank has caused many brands to re-think their social media strategy, some of the old marketing axioms hold true, one of the best being the absolute necessity of calls to action. Fans are much more likely to do what you want them to do if you actually ask them to do it. If you want fans to share your content, “share this post!” or “please share!” ” should be clearly stated. Like this post if you agree . . .” is another tried and true strategy for fan engagement. You might be surprised at how effective asking for engagement can be.

5) Have fun: Above all, remember that no one is on Facebook to read an endless stream of brand postings, just like no one watches TV just for the commercials. If brands truly want to stay in their fans’ timelines, they need to be entertaining. Talk about current events, ask questions, take polls, post cartoons. Do whatever it takes to hold the attention and favor of your fans.

Just like in real life, engaging and entertaining others means not talking about yourself all day long. A good rule of thumb to follow is to post about your brand one-third of the time, post about and ask questions of your fans one-third of the time, and post about things that are of interest to both your brand and your fans one-third of the time. While this “Rule of One-Thirds” is easily modifiable to suit your brand’s needs, it’s a good touchstone to keep you on the right path.

Has EdgeRank made it harder for brands to reach their fans via Facebook? Undoubtedly. We’ll probably never return to the days when brands are able to reach 60% of their fans without paying to do so. But, as with all things social media, creativity and flexibility remain the keys to remaining relevant, visible, and worthy of engagement by brand fans.

The post Understanding EdgeRank: Five Ways To Reach More Fans on Facebook appeared first on 435 Digital.

Have a great weekend!

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The main goal of any good social media campaign, obviously, is attract people to your brand page, not to cause them to run screaming in the other direction as fast as humanly possible. Unfortunately, that’s what many inexperienced community managers end up doing. Certain mistakes can sink any social media campaign, no matter how good the underlying concept.

Avoid these four no-nos to keep your social media campaign flying high:

Don’t Overpost Social Media Messages

While it may be tempting to flood follower’s timelines with posts and status updates singing the praises of your brand, there’s no quicker way to turn people off. In fact, in a Facebook posting study, 44% of Facebook users listed overposting as the main reason for unliking a brand.

The best rule is to post when you have something to say, not when you feel the need to say something. For most brands, this means no more than once a day, and possibly as little as 2-3 times per week. While fewer tweets and Facebook updates flies in the face of what many brand managers think they should be doing, study after study has shown that, when it comes to social media marketing, less is more.

Don’t Post Sloppy Social Content

Fewer things make a brand page look less professional than pixelated photos, extraneous links, and spelling or grammatical errors. Before you push out a post or tweet, take a moment to make sure that everything is clean, spelled correctly, and reflects the image your brand wants to convey. An additional ten seconds of proofreading goes a long way.

Don’t Refuse to Engage Social Media Followers:

It’s called social media for a reason: the conversation you have with your followers is supposed to be a two-way street. Nothing turns customers off faster than feeling ignored and under-valued by a brand.

Take a few moments each day to check your brand’s Facebook messages and wall posts, as well as Twitter direct messages and interactions, and to respond in a courteous and timely manner. Don’t make the mistake one international brand did – they ignored their customers for so long, their official Facebook page has now become a place for disgruntled customers to share war stories about bad service and shoddy merchandise.

Don’t Forget To Provide Benefit to Followers

Let’s face it: the times, they are a-changing. Facebook users’ timelines are flooded with brand posts, all vying for a customer’s attention. In order to make the cut (and stay in a customer’s timelines), brands need to offer their customers something of value. These days, that usually means one of three things: 1) Startlingly interesting content; 2) Hysterically funny content; or 3) Discounts. If you can make it work, shoot for all three. Before you post, take a moment to ask yourself what value your post is adding to a customer’s life. Will it make them smile? Teach them something they didn’t know? Get them something for less than they would normally? If not, think twice about whether you really want to hit that post/Tweet button.

The post Four Ways to Torpedo Your Social Media Campaign appeared first on 435 Digital.

Do you have a person in your office who is obsessed with a particular snack food?

We do, too.

This is Rich.

Rich loves Takis. You know, these things:

How much does he love Takis? About this much.

Luckily for Rich, today we brought him some Takis.

Alas, Rich decided to work from home today.

So he could watch his sister’s dogs.

So we are eating the Takis.

Sorry, Rich.

The post Why You Should Never Work From Home appeared first on 435 Digital.

And while we don’t have any photos of today’s birthday lunch for SEO’s Dario, we do have this old photo of him cleaning out the office fridge.

Happy Birthday to all the 435ers celebrating this week!

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As you can imagine, few things in the age of the internet have gone viral faster than Tom Hanks performning slam poetry about 90s sitcom “Full House.”

Come on, it’s everywhere you look.

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Today it was announced that YouTube, one of the biggest search engines in the world in and of its own right, has changed its algorithm, rewarding videos that people “watch longer” with higher video search rankings. In an nutshell, “watch time” is now worth more than “view count” in the YouTube algorithm.

YouTube’s video discovery features were previously designed to drive views. This rewarded videos that were successful at attracting clicks, rather than the videos that actually kept viewers engaged. (This short-sighted focus led some video marketers to use “cleavage thumbnails” to attract clicks.)

“Now when we suggest videos, we focus on those that increase the amount of time that the viewer will spend watching videos on YouTube, not only on the next view, but also successive views thereafter,” Meyerson said. “If viewers are watching more YouTube, it signals to us that they’re happier with the content they’ve found. It means that creators are attracting more engaged audiences. It also opens up more opportunities to generate revenue for our partners.”

The shift in YouTube’s algorithm reflects the attempt on the part of search engines to reward follower engagement across all social media channels. The takeaway: want to see your videos rank higher in video search? Make your videos more engaging and give viewers a reason to stick around.

The post YouTube Wants You To Watch Longer . . . appeared first on 435 Digital.

Have a great weekend!

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Here’s a quick look at what the team at 435 Digital is reading this morning:

Our Web Development department will be happy to see that Mashable has begun beating the drum on mobile development for small businesses:

With increasing numbers of consumers using mobile devices to make their holiday purchases, smartphones and tablet computers may be elbowing aside elves as Santa’s helpers this year, experts predict. But small businesses remain woefully unprepared to attract and engage these holiday shoppers, several new studies show. They’ve yet to climb aboard the mobile bandwagon.

Last year, consumers spent more than $20.7 billion shopping using mobile devices, according to a report from Javelin Strategy and Research. That figure is sure to swell this year, experts said.

Though a mobile or responsive design site seems like a no-brainer in the age of the smartphone, most small-to-medium-sized businesses continue to plod along with sites that are not optimized for mobile viewing. So does your business need a mobile-optimized website? The answer is probably “yes.”

Getting pushback from the higher ups on the importance of search engine optimization? You’re in luck. Search Engine Watch tells you how to prove the value of SEO in ten minutes:

Convincing others of the importance of organic search and the need for SEO management has admittedly become easier over the years. Many have followed suit with competitors to jump into SEO endeavors to keep pace and many are coming to see that online organic ROI often times is much better than traditional marketing, is better targeted and easier to measure.

However, there remains a skeptical, more “old school” crowd, that still needs to be shown the need for organic search devotion. Whether you work for an agency trying to make a sale or on an in-house team tired of not drawing leads, taking a look at your Google Analytics data with this 10-minute drill down on what organic is doing for you can make a great impact.

This terrific piece goes on to instruct the reader on how to answer all the usual and predictable arguments against SEO, including why organic search is important, why direct traffic isn’t the answer, and how to discuss conversion. And if YOU’RE not sold on SEO, you will be by the end of this article.

Finally, if you were rained in like we were yesterday, you undoubtedly spent part of your day glued to your television or laptop, watching a guy jump out of a really, really, really high balloon. Apparently, everyone was watching it, because Felix Baumgartner not only broke three freefall records yesterday, he also broke one of YouTube’s record:

It’s official: Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the edge of space broke a record for the “live stream with the most concurrent views ever on YouTube,” according to the video-sharing website.

At peak, there were more than 8 million concurrent live streams, YouTube said in a Sunday blog post. The jump was broadcast on Red Bull’s YouTube channel.

What’s maybe most amazing about this particular record is that there were 8 million concurrent live streams on YouTube while the entire event was being shown live on the Discovery Channel. It looks like we’re quickly approaching the age when people are just as likely to click on a live stream as they are to flip on the TV.

Happy Monday!

The post What We’re Reading: Mobile Holidays, Defending SEO, and Fearless Felix appeared first on 435 Digital.

Here’s a quick look at what the team at 435 Digital is reading this morning:

We’ll start off with the big news this morning: Rumors are swirling fast and furious that Apple will launch the iPad mini on October 23, 2012

Apple is expected to announce its new ‘iPad Mini’ product on October 23, likely unveiling its new 7.85-inch tablet at an invite-only event at the company’s Town Hall Auditorium, AllThingsD reports today.

According to ATD’s John Paczkowski, Apple will break from tradition and hold the event on a Tuesday, launching just days before Microsoft launches its Windows 8 operating system and it’s highly-anticipated Surface tablet.

We can’t help but wonder if the quick launch of the iPad mini is the result of several recent articles likening the iPad Mini to an over-sized iPhone. Even so, we’d be lying if we said we weren’t curious to see this thing, already. Will Apple be able to tap into the mini-tablet market that Amazon and Kindle have so successfully mined? We’re all about to find out.

Will the 2012 Presidential Election go down as the first “mobile” election in history?

A month before Election Day, it’s unclear whether Obama or Romney will become the president of the United States for the next four years. But there’s one thing we already know: Each campaign has set a mobile precedent for future political races.

The candidates’ efforts to reach younger and tech-savvy voters over the past several months have proved useful, and perhaps necessary. Both camps have seen success thus far, but only in November will we be able to elect a winner.

While teh idea of mobile marketing is just now starting to pick up steam in the world of e-commerce, the two Presidential candidates have been way head of the curve,employing digital strategies that incorporate mobile fundraising, rolling out apps, and even pushing out political ads via smartphones. If only corporate America would embrace mobile marketing as quickly and completely as President Obama and Mitt Romney have!

Finally, yesterday Facebook was called out on the carpet for allegedly shady ad practices:

Two prominent social media marketing executives have gone on record to accuse Facebook of quietly altering one of its key algorithms in September, so that companies with pages that have large numbers of followers can now only reach a fraction of the followers they used to with each post.

Jeff Doak, head of social measurement at WPP ad agency Team Detroit (which handles the Ford account) and Social@Ogilvy vp/digital strategy Geoffrey Colon, both claim that Facebook has altered its “Edgerank” algorithm, which controls which Facebook posts end up in fans’ news feeds. (Ogilvy is also a WPP shop.)

“The change resulted in many pages losing 40-50% (or more) of their organic reach,” Doak said in a blog post:

This news echoes what social media mangers have suspected for some time: that Facebook has deliberately decreased the reach of brand pages to encourage advertisers to invest in Facebook’s “Promoted Posts” and “Sponsored Stories.” Sadly, Facebook didn’t exactly deny the allegations, stating only that they continue to tweak their algorithm frequently for many different reasons. As a result, brands are not happy, brand managers are not happy, and Facebook’s PR department isn’t happy.

We hope that YOU are happy and that you have a great weekend!

The post What We’re Reading: The iPad Mini is Nigh, the Election Goes Mobile, and Facebook Gets Shady appeared first on 435 Digital.