Facebook drives Marketer’s over the Edge

So, your brand has a thousand fans on Facebook? With EdgeRank is can be all but useless. 

EdgeRank is Facebook’s algorithm, the determiner of visibility on the social networking site. The specifics of the formula is under lock and key in the Facebook headquarters but we have surmised enough to post accordingly. 

What is Edge?
Facebook defines all content input in the site as an object.  This includes status updates, pictures, links, videos and just about everything else you upload on your page.  An edge is made on the object when it is uploaded onto Facebook.  Every time someone interacts with the object like commenting, sharing or liking it edges are generated. Take note that post made manually carries more weight with Edge than if posted by an automated program.

Edge uses these three factors:

• Affinity: Based on how often a Facebook user interacts with a page through likes, comments, wall posts, etc. This also refers to the
• Weight: Based on the level of interaction the post has elicited. For instance, commenting on a post takes considerably more effort than liking a post. Therefore, a Facebook post that elicits a lot of comments is likely to have a high page rank
  It appears that the hierarchy of objects is:
  - Photo/Video
  - Links
  - Status updates
• Time: The age of the post as well as the “freshness” of the content.

What does Edge mean for your Facebook page?
Edge is by no mean a negative Facebook development; active pages are going to thrive while stagnant pages will fall behind. 

How to engage your audience:

1. Ask questions
2. Post games and trivia
3. Interact with fan engagement
4. Use wall sapplets (polls, coupons, etc.)
5. Use relevant photos
6. Relate to current events
7. Post videos
8. Post content for time-sensitive campaigns
9. Include links within posts
10. Be clear in your posts

What do you think of these new developments? Join the conversation on The Social Media Network. 

What's Your Twitter Sentiment?

Twitter is the ultimate word of mouth tool. In 140 characters a 12 year old with a following of 10 000 can slag your brand so bad that all the water of the ocean would not be able to clean it again. Alternatively, a hash tag praising your services and be created trend worldwide. If one does not monitor the Twitterverse all this can pass you by. 

Four seconds after the Japanese New Year the Tweet Per Second (TPS) record was broken with 6,939 Tweets per second! Twitter waits for no one. Catch up with the sentiment of your brand with these tools:

Back to Basics
One can simply monitor one’s mentions with Twitter’s search tool or by creating a dedicated steam on a Twitter browser such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. Use Twitter’s advanced search to refine your search. 

Colour Coding
Twitter Sentiment tracks positive versus negative mentions of a keyword (e.g. your brand). The results are displayed in a pie as well as a line graph with red depicting negative, green for positive and white as neutral. One can even see which of tweets are considered negative, positive and natural which makes it easy to respond on specific threads.

On the Radar
twitrradr tracks opinions on twitter by sorting tweets in three columns: Positive and Negative and Neutral. 

Strength and Passion
With Social Mention you can track your brand’s sentiment over a multitude of social networks. It looks at four aspects: 1) The Strength (the likelihood of the brand being discussed in social media), 2) Sentiment (positive versus negative tweets), 3) Passion (likelihood of brand being discussed repeatedly) and 4) Reach (range of influence). It is a free service that is comprehensive and insightful.

Monitoring your Social Media Presence

Monitoring your social media presence is incredibly important - but many business owners and marketers are concerned it will take too much time. Yes its great to have a whole team  devoted to social media monitoring But with these free tips, even one single person can make a difference to monitoring your social media presence.
Cover these 5 steps over a cup of coffee and you'll build social media into a healthy daily inbound marketing routine!

1) Check Twitter for chatter about your company ( 2 minutes ): Use tools like TweetDeck or Twitter Search to monitor conversations about your company in real-time.
2) Scan Google Alerts ( 1.5 minutes ): Check Google Alerts for your company name, products, executives or brand terms. To set this up, enter your search terms in a Google Alert and select to receive updates as they happen or once daily. Now, when people blog about your products, an alert will be sent to your inbox. You can read the articles and respond right away!
3) Check Facebook stats ( 1 minute ): Visit your Company Page's Facebook Insights. This can be found under the page's main photo if you are an admin for your page. Scan your active users and interaction stats. Check out your wall posts or new discussions if you have them enabled for your page.
4) Answer Industry-related LinkedIn questions ( 3 minutes ): Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer. You can set up an RSS feed for specific question categories to go to your Google Reader as well. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website or a relevant blog post that might be helpful to your audience.
5) Use Google Reader to check Flickr, Digg and others ( 2.5 minutes ): Also set up RSS feeds for searches on your company name and industry terms in other social media sites. Similar to monitoring LinkedIn and Twitter, your Reader will serve as a great place to centralize your other searches too!

Don't forget networking is a Contact Sport ....

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