Facebook has decided to make these adjustments based on the data it has gathered through its Feed Quality Program. This update is part of Facebook’s Feed Quality Program which is a big initiative it’s working on to significantly improve the News Feed experience for its billion-plus users.
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One of the reasons for this, says Facebook, is that many users spend very little time reading a story after clicking on it, something that often happens with articles that might be said to be clickbait. The goal is understand which stories it should surface in your News Feed to keep you more interested in reading.
Facebook’s reasoning for testing this method of showing posts is that they want people to see posts that they’re actually interested in. We are adding another factor to News Feed ranking so that we will now predict how long you spend looking at an article in the Facebook mobile browser or an Instant Article after you have clicked through from News Feed. This will help Facebook to not only determine what sort of article interest users but also help the social network to identify clickbait that doesn’t deliver what it promises.
This change will apply to Facebook Instant articles and stories displayed in Facebook’s mobile browser.
So an article that readers quickly exit out of because it doesn’t live up to its headline will be treated as worse than a longer feature that readers spend several minutes in before returning to the newsfeed.
“This update to ranking will take into account how likely you are to click on an article and then spend time reading it. We will not be counting loading time towards this”. Diversity of post sources was also identified as something that is more enriching to users. Most pages won’t see significant changes, it says, while some may see minor increases or decreases in traffic.
The company is also looking at ways to reduce how often you’ll see multiple posts from the same source within your News Feed.
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The rollout of the new News Feed started recently, and will continue over the next few weeks; it will affect both your personal Facebook feed and that of any pages you have on the platform. As always, Pages should refer to Facebook’s publishing best practices.
