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Altimeter Group recently studied the internal goals in corporate social strategy. The top priority stated by 48% of companies was “Creating ROI Measurements”. Hypatia Research showed management’s expectations of the return on social communities are rather low. Research by Chief Marketer shows that the number of likes, friends & followers are the most used metrics by 60% of U.S. B2C and B2B marketers.

There exists great controversy about the use of ‘reach’ metrics.

I noticed strong correlations between all of the metrics. This means that reach, amplification, conversations and sentiment appear to measure the same kind of digital influence.

Facebook's Newsfeed algorithm, formerly called EdgeRank

It's becoming apparent that there's a still a misconception in some circles around the idea that Facebook is an agnostic platform—akin to a public plaza—that doesn't systematically curate the user experience. Indeed, it's become safe to say that the Menlo Park, Calif.-based digital giant is tweaking its algorithm to highlight content in a fashion that's not unlike a newspaper or magazine's online presence.

just as Google has reworked its search algorithm over the years to the chagrin of SEO marketers, Facebook's maneuvers are now making publishers rethink their Newsfeed strategies. Whether more ad spend is the result of this thought process remains to be seen.

to determine if any given Page post shows up in the news feed, Facebook looks at four main factors: If you interacted with an author’s posts before: If you Like every post by a Page that Facebook shows you, it will show you more from that Page. Other people’s reactions to a specific post: If everyone else on Facebook shown a post ignores it or complains, it’s less likely to show you that post. Your interaction with posts of the same type in the past: If you always Like photos, there’s a better chance you’ll see a photo posted by a Page. If that specific post has received complaints by other users who have seen it, or the Page who posted it has received lots complaints in the past, you’ll be less likely to see that post. This factor became a lot more prevalent starting in September 2012.

Let’s say Darth Vader posts that he and Luke Skywalker have confirmed that they are father and son. To determine if Yoda saw this post in his news feed, Facebook would look at: whether Yoda had Liked or interacted with posts by Vader in the past, if Leia and Han Solo Liked the relationship post by Vader when Facebook showed it to them, whether Yoda tended to interact with relationship change posts in the past, and whether anyone else had complained about Vader or this particular post by the Sith Lord.

Facebook says it adjusts the way in which it weights these factors to try to increase engagement and general satisfaction. Maybe reach decreases on some Pages, but people interact more with the news feed overall, according to Cathcart.

BuzzSpice found that 72 percent of the pages it studied exhibited what it called “manic-depression behavior,” not posting content in a consistent manner, but adding posts in flurries, then going silent for more than two weeks, in some cases.

Pages that do not stay in constant touch with their fans get decreasing score on the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm, lose visibility, and eventually disappear from their fans’ News Feeds.

Essentially what Facebook is doing here is making users pay to improve their EdgeRank score for individual status updates, the system that Facebook uses to determine how high individual stories appear in the news feed

It is really not all that different from how Google has structured its own business, where companies or individuals can pay for keywords to appear as advertisements in search results. The difference is that Google’s search engine is a much more impersonal mechanisms than is the Facebook news feed.

Where Facebook is making a mistake is in crossing the bridge between paid sponsored posts for businesses and applying it to individuals

Facebook’s algorithm uses a number of factors to establish which posts should be shown to users. Previously called EdgeRank, the algorithm now has more than 1,000 contributing factors, but it still focuses on three main influences: affinity, weight, and Time.

Affinity is defined by a user’s relationship with the person or page that created the specific Facebook object — essentially how much the user interacts with that person or page.

Time, the last major factor, takes into account how recent the action occurred, which, in Facebook vernacular, is called time decay.

Fewer people are seeing Facebook posts from brands, businesses and celebrities, the social network has acknowledged. 

It is unclear how page views have been affected, but a report from Valleywag today claims the company is slashing organic reach to just one to two percent of people who have clicked a Page’s Like button.

Each day, there are an average of 1,500 stories the company can show in someone’s news feed, and Facebook said in December that as a result of the increased competition for post views, many pages will likely see a decline in organic reach.