In social media work, which has become hugely important to sales and marketing strategy, lasting results call for correctly decoding the Facebook Edgerank algorithm rather than reaching for short-term fixes — getting the page liked, getting a photo liked, and so on. It's only natural that Facebook page managers who haven't worked this out are baffled when the numbers don't add up.

Let's explain with an example: your brand has a Facebook page with 5,000 likes. Your posts, though, only reach 1,000 people. And barely a handful of people ever comment underneath them. Naturally, brand managers fall into the trap of assuming their page is "broken" and that posts simply aren't being seen by all their "fans." Worse still, visitors who see no comments or likes under a post start to assume the page itself is "untrustworthy."

The reality is a little more complicated than that. In Facebook's early days, membership was low and people's friend lists were nowhere near as long. A post could stay on the news feed for a long time and hold users' attention. But as Facebook's membership grew, so did people's friend lists, the pages they liked, and the number of brand pages — which sent the news feed racing past at high speed. That's when Facebook built an algorithm to slow the feed down, and gave it the name Facebook Edgerank.

Facebook Edgerank is essentially a scoring system. It shows content that gets liked, shared and commented on more to the users who are in "regular interaction" with that page. If you've liked a page but never interacted with it, Facebook picks up on that and stops showing that page's posts in your feed. If you tend to like videos from the pages you follow, you'll start seeing more videos in your feed. If you're a fan of photos rather than video, photos are what get surfaced for you instead.

So What Are the Consequences?

The most important result is that it stops Facebook users from drowning in the thousands of posts on their news feed. People end up spending their time online more productively, seeing more content in the areas they're genuinely interested in. Someone who mainly wants to see home-decor posts on Facebook, for instance, is spared the constant distraction of cute cat pictures.

What Does This Mean For Brands?

For companies and brands, Facebook Edgerank might look restrictive, but it actually pushes them to focus on a defined target audience — and that's exactly where a social media consultant's skill comes in. Facebook pushes brands to pay to "boost" a post. But that spend isn't wasted, because it reaches a genuine target audience directly, and it can even work out cheap compared with other advertising channels. What really shows a social media consultant's skill here is being able to read the feedback that comes back from the audience a post reaches. Which users like which kind of content? Do video posts get more likes on the page, or photos? Do poll-style questions draw more interest, or discussions? A social media consultant who understands Facebook's seemingly restrictive Edgerank system, and manages it well, can turn all of this into data — and over the long run, that data helps build the brand's visibility.