Twice as many watch videos on Facebook now compared to six months ago, Facebook executives said in an announcement today, which is why there’s about to be an improvement to how videos are ranked in the News Feed.
More specifically, there will be an improvement to the rankings of videos that people and Pages upload directly to Facebook. Facebook wants to better understand what videos people are interested in watching, and ensure that relevant videos appear more prominently in the News Feed.
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.
Going forward, your individual News Feed will be personalized based on your video watching preferences. If you often watch videos in your News Feed then you can expect to see more videos near the top of your feed.
The opposite is also true, if you tend to skip over videos without watching them then expect to see fewer videos.
Facebook says that in early tests, this improvement resulted in more people watching more videos that are relevant to them.
There will be no change to how Facebook ranks videos that are shared via links to other sites, such as YouTube.
Facebook gives the following recommendation for Pages when 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.
Of course, Facebook also recommends that Page owners post stories and videos that will resonate most with their audience.
