Facebook doesn’t show all the activities of your connections in your news feed.  Instead, Facebook filters posts, mostly trying to show the posts that you’d be most interested in. Facebook does this through a special algorithm known as EdgeRank.

What is EdgeRank?

EdgeRank is an algorithm that decides what are the most relevant posts to show in your news feed, and this is based on three variables:

• Time Decay: As a post ages, it continues to lose importance. Thus, newer posts attain a higher score for this variable than older posts. 
• Weight: Different types of posts carry different types of weight. In order, they rank (1) Photos/video (2) Links (3) Plain text updates.  Additionally, Facebook will typically give higher weight to a post that incorporates new Facebook features because Facebook wants people to start using it.  Thus, use new Facebook features if you’re looking for extra ways to maximize your post’s reach.
• Affinity: Affinity measures the relationship between the viewing user and the creator of the story. The closer the relationship, the higher the score.  Thus, posts by your brother identified on Facebook will more likely show in your Facebook news feed than a post by a stranger you connected with several years ago.  Affinity is determined based upon many factors, such as your interactions to previous posts by the author, how often you visit the Facebook page, your identified interests, and more.

So, if you want your posts to appear in people’s news feeds, try to achieve a higher EdgeRank.

Read More: 4 Tips to Improve Your Facebook EdgeRank to Reach More People

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Photo credit: Thos003 / Foter.com / CC BY