Many business-owners we talk to don’t know that not everyone who likes their Facebook page sees all (or even any) of their posts. So this week’s links will tell you how this works.

First of all, you need to know about something called EdgeRank. From TechCrunch:

Facebook’s news feed ranking algorithm (widely known as EdgeRank) chooses between hundreds or thousands of pieces of content each day to show the few dozen most relevant stories in each person’s news feed.

Facebook told me in February that the average Page reaches 16 percent of its fans with each post. That’s because some fans aren’t online when the post is published, a specific post hasn’t gotten much engagement from the people Facebook already showed it to, and because if you don’t interact with that Page when you do see its posts, Facebook will only show you them every once in awhile.

In February last year, it might have been true that a post on an average page is shown to 16 percent of fans. It seems to have gone down significantly since then, to 10% or even less.

Here’s an explanation of how Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm works. It’s based on three variables: Affinity (your fan’s history of interacting with your content), Time Decay (newer posts are more likely to show up), and Weight (what kind of posts do your fans interact with  more — in general, as opposed to Affinity, which is for particular fans. Confusing, I know.)

Basically, the more fans engage with your content, the more likely your content is shown to them. This infographic explains more.

How do you increase the reach of your content? Mashable has some (obvious) tips.

Also on Mashable are these more interesting and actionable tips. This article is from 2011, but these should still work!

The short version: focus on engaging your fans. For Facebook, reach –> engagement/interaction –> more reach.

Liked this post? Like us on Facebook for more updates and tips.