Further to my post from last week, another big trend I’m noticing these days on Facebook is that folks are not posting their link the main status update. Instead, what they’re doing is posting the link in the first comment of the thread that gets created when you post a link.
The theory behind this is: if Facebook gives higher Edgerank to short, text-only posts, then posting your link in the first comment gives you an advantage in two ways:
- First of all, comments help to increase your Edgerank, and
- Links in your status update may decrease your Edgerank.
I asked one of my friends, Liz, whom I’d noticed doing this, if she found that it made a difference. Her response: “I have noticed that traffic patterns are completely random on Facebook….at least that what it (frustratingly) seems…”
In other words, it doesn’t seem to make a difference.
I took a random sampling of posts I’d put up, some with the link in the update, and some with the link in the posts, and the ones with the link in the posts actually performed better.
| Date | Link in update | Link in Comments | # hits |
| Sept 20 | x | 102 | |
| Sept 13 | x | 154 | |
| Sept 16 | x | 182 | |
| Sept 17 | x | 462 | |
| Sept 24 | x | 440 |
You can also read this really great article about another mom blogger’s experiment on Mommifried.
Okay. So–here’s the thing. We all want our FB posts to get as much reach as possible. Just to reiterate what I said in my post last week, I think that is going to look different for everyone. There’s no one-size-fits all solution to Edgerank. Simply put, if you publish interesting stuff that your audience likes, it will be seen. So experiment, post different types of things, some plain text, some images, post DIYs and how-tos, post inspirational content, post links. And then sit back and watch the data. See what the data says. Then do more of that. Because that’s what your audience wants.