Facebook Adjusts News Feed Algorithm To Serve People More Relevant Video

Facebook announced today a News Feed algorithm change that is intended to show more relevant video to users.

Now instead of considering likes, comments and shares to rank a video’s popularity, Facebook will also take into account whether and how long a video is viewed.

“People who tend to watch more video in News Feed should expect to see more videos near the top of their Feed,” Facebook wrote in a blog post. “Conversely, people who tend to skip over videos without watching them should expect to see fewer videos.”

The change applies to videos uploaded directly to the Facebook platform. Videos linked from other sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, already were ranked using similar metrics.

In testing, Facebook said, the change resulted in users watching more video, which coincides with an overall increase of video viewing on the network with twice as many people watching video on Facebook than did six months ago.

Now the popular videos will be served more often and more prominently to more people, making it even more important for marketers to pay close attention to video metrics. Not coincidentally, no doubt, Facebook upgraded its video metrics for Pages last month to include duration of view and audience retention.