Hey guys, I have a pretty popular face page, with about 100,000 followers. In the past we would get about 50,000 impressions on a given story (on average) with good traffic to our site. Each story would get about 200 likes on the wall itself.
However, as of just a few days ago, we have had a dramatic drop-off where now each story gets only about 2000-4000 impressions and about 20-30 likes on the wall.
Have no idea what has happened, but it seems to be something systematic. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Welcome to EdgeRank!
In short edgerank is facebook’s version of pagerank that qualifies your page’s relevancy to users based on their own engagement with it [viewing, liking, commenting, posting], the engagement of their friends & the general page community, the timing of the update and some other factors. The less people do, the less posts show up. Depending on the user and the size of their network something like 6/10 brand posts can end up suppressed from their top news feed. That’s why you had 100k fans generating 50k views despite the fact that almost all of the 100k log in daily.
As a page grows there’s a natural decrease in relevancy as new fans are less relevant but with good posting and fan acquisition strategies this can be mitigated.
This may be the sharpest drop I’ve seen so it’s possible something else is at play too but, since you have 100k fans, it seems unlikely… that alone should get you to 40-60k views. Hopefully something mistriggered but regardless, it’s time to build back up.
Focus on the types of posts that get the most engagement. Demotarget everything. Use timing aggressively to meet your audience where they live (whether that’s 9am or 9pm) and just try to get engagement going… a view is good, a like is better, a comment great and a direct post or upload is best. Show facebook that your page’s fans like your page a lot.
At the same time head on over to your insights tab and look for the sharp declines to other areas. We know impressions are down but how about likes? Active users? Pageviews [actual views of the page]. Those analytics can have gems.
I’ve written about this a few times [in fact it’s the featured blog post in my signature] but this system is one of those secretive, complex, beasts so while you’ll find a lot written, it’s all speculation.
Ted,
Thanks for the insights! Reading your blog post now…
You know, i figured it was something along the edgerank theme, but this drop was literally an overnight drop, so I feel like something must have triggered it. I guess edgerank must have done some kind of monthly recompile and realized my page sucks now. 
Thanks for the help so far
Your drop is HUGE like nothing I’ve ever heard of.
If you have an advertising account I’d call your ad rep [or get one real quick].
If not please keep sharing about your experience. I’d like to think we can get you back up to a reasonable level quickly and I also have to imagine there was some wrench thrown in the mix incorrectly if you had ~200 interactions / post.
Great explanation Ted S.
Also it is my understanding that images or videos with lots of likes or comments typically receive a higher edge rank then a status update or article link.
Just an update, been a few days since i’ve contacted facebook, with still no response.
We are still sitting at about 10% of our normal traffic, which all took a nosedive in one day and hasnt recovered since.
Since I cant get a response from them and noone seems to have seen something like this before, we are unfortunatly pulling out from facebook We cant outlay this kind of money for facebook to only get 20 likes on a story.
Thanks for the help anyways guys! Will update if anything changes to help out anyone else in a similar sitatuation!
Do you have an advertising program with facebook? Their support is pretty sketchy but account rep team is great if you have access…
Yup I do have an ads account, if i continued advertising for a year will have dropped over 100,000k on it, seems all for waste now. I know customer service with facebook/google can be hard to come around, but when you are paying out this kind of money, you would expect some kind of response… arrogance.
You know one thing I discovered, i’ve normally been putting up posts via the graph API. But I decided to put up a manual post, and the manual post got the normal amount of hits. I wonder if facebook decided to downgrade the graph API weight?
Ok so you’re advertising decently but do yo have an account rep at facebook who helps with your ads? Or have you ever been contacted by one?
Maybe your API application got ranked down?
Got rather curious on this and pinged my Twitter base. @ChadWittman who runs EdgeRankChecker.com confirmed that the API does come in at a lower score AND is getting lower these days so it sounds like the key has been discovered, now it’s a matter of optimizing around it.
Wow, thanks for the effort with that, I really appreciate it. It makes sense that its the API that got lowered, but it was literally dropped in one single day to a level 10% of what it used to be (90% drop), as if a switch was literally flipped. If it was an edgerank think I figured it would be more gradual?
Well it is what it is I guess. Do you think there is a way to repair the API edgerank score, or this is likely a permanant change? Seems counter productive to force large page owners to manually push news to the wall?
Thanks again for the hard efforts!
I think it’s time to ask Facebook. I’ll PM you on how…
My fans are not much and I am still building my fans. um… my page’s impression is average. I noticed, when come to Friday - Monday, the impression will drop a little bit compared to other days. I wondered why?
Because people use facebook differently over the course of the week. You need to discover your fan’s sweetspot… it may be 9am or 9pm local time, tuesday or saturday, and post to it, not to when it’s easiest for you.
I have a facebook business page and up to three days ago I was seeing the # of impressions on each post. But about 3 days ago I am no longer seeing the # of impressions? Does anyone know what could be the reason? Thanks.
It can take a few days for the stats to compile. Once the past has moved back, check the insights tab to view results.
He has a point, you should try and target basic break points for jobs as well, like around lunch or a little after people get off work. What ever your target audience is, you need to learn the basic pattern of that ages life style or just basics of people in general in order to maximize the sharing potential.
I wonder if this EdgeRank really exist? I want a proof of it. I get bothered about it because it is a big slam between PageRank and EdgeRank. Conflicting to SEO strategies.