Facebook wants to fine-tune the News Feed to fit your needs

Jun 24, 2014 12:54 GMT  ·  By

Facebook has announced a new set of ranking rules for the videos displayed on users’ news feeds, based on the time spent by each individual watching these.

“The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right stories to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss anything important and relevant to them. Video is an important part of News Feed – in fact, twice as many people now watch videos on Facebook compared to just six months ago,” said Facebook’s Brett Welch, product manager, and Xiaochen Zhang, software engineer.

So, the social network has decided to tweak its algorithm a little more to improve the way videos showing on people’s news feeds rank. Regardless of whether they come from other users or Pages, the content will go through Facebook’s new strainer.

How will Facebook decide whether to display the content or not? Well, the company will take into account just how much time you spend watching such videos. The new condition is added to the list that includes likes, comments and shares, which determines whether or not you’ll get similar content in your News Feed again and how often.

“This also helps us personalize News Feed based on people’s preference for watching video. People who tend to watch more video in News Feed should expect to see more videos near the top of their Feed. Conversely, people who tend to skip over videos without watching them should expect to see fewer videos,” write the two Facebook employees, who also mention that the changes will affect all videos uploaded directly to Facebook.

Basically, if you watch more videos, you’re likely going to see more of them in the feed. If you often move past them, click on just a few of them or rarely ever reach the end of the video, you’re likely going to see considerably less videos in your feed.

As previously mentioned, the new changes made by Facebook can only take into consideration your behavior towards the videos that uploaded to its own platform. Links to other sites, including the likes of YouTube and Vimeo, are already measured by a different set of metrics.

Facebook has been implementing a slew of changes to its News Feed algorithm, trying to make it as relevant as possible to what people want to see and read, adding new rules and taking out old ones as feedback returned.

While there’s very little that Facebook can do about the content that people share on their profiles, it is advising Page owners to post stories and videos that will resonate with the audiences they’ve built on the platform.