Facebook will now favor News Feed posts based on how long you look at them
Facebook is about to
get a much better idea of what you like and don’t like in your News Feed – even
if you don’t bother to like, click or share it.
Realizing that people don’t
always hit the like button on everything they’re interested in, Facebook
decided to tweak its algorithms to account for a new metric: the amount of time
you spend looking at things in your feed, regardless of whether or not you
actively interact with it.
With the new algorithm
in place (which will be coming out over the new few weeks) stories will be
promoted in your News Feed not only if they are highly liked, commented on, or
shared, but also if your friends happen to be spending time actually reading
and looking at those posts.
Facebook software
engineer Ansha Yu wrote, “It’s not as simple as just
measuring the number of seconds you spend on each story, Some people may spend
10 seconds on a story because they really enjoy it, while others may spend 10
seconds on a story because they have a slow Internet connection."
So, what is the solution? They have
discovered that if people spend significantly more time on a particular story
in News Feed than the majority of other stories they look at, and then this is
a good sign that the content was relevant to them.
With that being said, there shouldn’t be
any dramatic changes to what pops up on your feed, at least not immediately.
The main aim here is to make the News Feed
more compelling and interesting for users and ultimately boost overall time
spent on the social network – by treating time spent on a post as another
measure of interaction.
Facebook says it’ll be rolling out the
algorithm tweak in the coming weeks – but before all you social media managers
of the world start panicking and coming up with strategies involving posts that
keep people hovering for longer, keep in mind that most Pages won’t see any
significant changes.
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