The Facebook Newsfeed – a mechanism designed to promote involvement
Recently, a company named EdgeRank Checker, that tracks fan engagement (through gauging increase/decrease in likes and comments) in facebook pages, found that Facebook pages with over 100,000 fans or more had a significantly higher percentage increase in fan engagement with the newly implemented Newsfeed when compared to pages who had between 10,000 to 100,000 fans. As the Newsfeed ranking system was updated by Facebook recently, the findings of the tracking company indicate that Facebook essentially wants to create an incentive for Pages to inspire fan engagement.
As the administrators of Facebook Pages naturally want their pages to be publicized, and the Newsfeed is a marketing tool that reaches a wide number of people, creating a ranking system for Pages would inspire Pages to create more value in order to inspire fan engagement, which would ultimately lead to more engagement in Facebook itself. Essentially Facebook has created the new Newsfeed to serve as a payoff for Pages to inspire more involvement.
Not only is Facebook inspiring more involvement in it’s pages – EdgeRank Checker, the ranking company itself relies on more webpages using it, as it’s effectiveness is determined by the number of different webpages it can compare with each other to provide a ranking. As we discussed in class, there are certain services where, the more people that actively use them, the more valuable they are to people. EdgeRank Checker is one example of such a service and so is Facebook itself, and this ingenious ranking system of the recent Newsfeed is testament to Facebook’s drive to grow and inspire more involvement from it’s users.
Source: http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-pages-engagement-2011-10