A Closer Look At Facebook Friends And Posts

While Facebook can be considered one of the major social networks world-wide, it may not have as much influence with many of its users as you're led to believe.

A recent study by recommend.ly found the following interesting facts after looking at more than 1.7 million Facebook pages:

• more than half of Facebook users (56%) have less than 256 fans.
• 31% have less than 32 fans.
• musician and band pages have the highest average of fans per page at 12,406, while spa pages have the lowest, with only 1300.
• 65% of all posts are status updates that don't contain a link or media.
• 82% of all pages have less than 5 wall updates a month (see the infographic).

What's more, the study found that there are 2 factors that are important when it comes to growing a Facebook audience:

• Content that is relevant, engaging, timely and posted on a regular basis.

• Rich media (like videos) embedded in your content.

Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank that determines what items populate your News Feed. This assignes a value to every post based on affinity (the relationship between the Friend and the user), weight and time. Weight is determined by the type of story, if it contains rich media, and any comments it might have. Time is when any action (like a comment or like) might have been taken.

Photos rank as the most valuable and powerful content that you can post, followed by videos and then link.

EdgeRank personalizes Facebook for each reader, so it's possible that many of your friends may not see every post that you make unless you follow the guidelines to keep things interesting. Just like with blogging, email newsletters, or any promotional online, you really have to keep it interesting to not only keep the audience that you have, but to grow it as well.

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