I am Jeff

I was chatting with Dustin Luther the other day about his newly coined phrase “Networking Engine Optimization“, or NEO, which is basically the understanding of how to optimize your content to best take advantage of the algorithms built into the social networking platforms (Facebook’s post quality score, Twitter’s trending topics, etc.).

In case you’re not familiar with how it works, Facebook has a built in rating system for pretty much everything these days. Things like the ads it shows you, recommended friends, recommended fan pages or groups, and even your content quality and where it places that content. NEO is similar to search engine optimization, or SEO, in that you’re “optimizing” content to get better results.  In SEO you’re after better placement in the search engines. In the case of NEO, you’re after better visibility for your content.

So how do you go about optimizing your content for Facebook?  Well, that’s a good question…  Like the Google algorithm, the Facebook algorithm is somewhat of an unknown. Let’s take a look at what we do know.

There are a couple of variables to the equation that Facebook gives us:

Active fans – The number of fans that have written on your wall, or somehow interacted with your posts (likes, comments or shares) over a 7 day rolling window.

Interactions – A total of all the interactions (likes, comments, or shares) from your active fans in that same 7 day window.

Post quality – A 5 star scoring system based on the percentage of your fans that engage when you post content. The number of stars is meant to compare the quality of your page to pages that are similar (roughly the same number of fans).

Now, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to get a better post quality score. You just have to create better content, right? Well, that’s part of the battle. Which part, we’re not really sure just yet. See, Facebook also recently implemented a new way of feeding content to it’s users.  The default view on your main Facebook page is set to “top news”.  This is where the algorithm comes in, and the need to optimize content. Your content is no longer guaranteed to show up in everyone’s “news feed” like it used to. Now, your posts are digested by some algorithm, and spit out containing some sort of ranking (this being the unknown part) which tells Facebook wether or not to display your content in the “top news” feed.

Basic stuff so far. Now, here’s the problem…

If you don’t create killer content right from the beginning, you may fall into the abyss. Your content won’t be seen because Facebook just isn’t showing it to people, unless they click on the “most recent” option to view everything. So how are they supposed to interact with it to increase your post quality score? It’s like a catch 22!

Since we obviously don’t have the answer to how to go about gaming the system and guaranteeing your content will be seen by everyone every time they log in to Facebook, here’s my suggestions (which happen to be pretty much parallel with what Facebook recommends) for how you can get the best interaction with your posts:

1. Make sure that your posts are relevant to your friends and fans.

2. Post engaging content – ask questions, create controversy, show some emotion!

3. Post consistently and frequently, but not to the point of being annoying. Post when you have something relevant and engaging (see above).

That should hold you over until someone at Facebook can shed some light on how to write a perfect status update. Which, I seriously doubt will ever happen.

Now, I would love to hear some of your thoughts and ideas on how you go about creating content for your business on Facebook, assuming you actually have a strategy and you’re not just winging it…