In a blog post over the weekend Ansha Yu and Sami Tas – software engineers at Facebook – announced that Facebook now keeps track of how long someone spends looking at an article to help personalize users newsfeeds. See Facebook doesn’t want to assume that the only popular articles are those with plenty of comments and likes – and as such determining how many people truly read an article becomes crucial in determining what to show in a users newsfeed.
Recently, as part of our ongoing effort to improve News Feed, we asked people to rate their experience and tell us how we can improve the content they see when they check Facebook.
From this research, we learned that in many cases, just because someone didn’t like, comment or share a story in their News Feed doesn’t mean it wasn’t meaningful to them. There are times when, for example, people want to see information about a serious current event, but don’t necessarily want to like or comment on it. Based on this finding, we are updating News Feed’s ranking to factor in a new signal—how much time you spend viewing a story in your News Feed.
The new algorithm factor is slowly rolling out over the next couple of weeks – so keep an eye out on your newsfeed and how it changes.