By Brett Welch, Product Manager, and Xiaochen Zhang, Software Engineer
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.
Today, we are announcing an improvement to how we rank the videos people and Pages are uploading directly to Facebook. Our goal is to better understand what videos people are interested in watching, so that relevant videos appear more prominently in News Feed.
Improving Video Ranking
The improvement we are making today considers whether someone has watched a video and for how long they watched it. We’re adding that to the factors we considered previously, which included likes, comments and shares. This change will affect all videos uploaded directly to Facebook.
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.
In our early tests, this improvement resulted in more people watching more videos that are relevant to them.
Impact on Video Links on Facebook
This change only applies to videos uploaded to Facebook directly by individuals and Pages. For links to other sites, including video sites, we already use a number of similar metrics to rank those stories.
Recommendations for Pages sharing Video
This improvement means that videos that people choose to watch will reach a larger audience, while videos that people ignore will be shown to fewer people.
As always, we recommend that Page owners post stories and videos that will resonate with their audience on Facebook. Use the new video metrics section in Page Insights to help understand which videos your audience is watching.