The social giant Facebook is at it again. Just when things seem to settle, the company again announced News Feed algorithm updates. The first update was in January 26th, 2017 which puts more emphasis on longer videos posted to the platform, as explained by Facebook:
What the update does is to make some adjustments based on engagements, rather than video length.
However, longer videos that people spend time watching may see a slight increase in distribution. So if a long video appears to attract more viewers, Facebook may put them more frequently on people's News Feed. On the other hand, this can affects shorter videos as they may see a slight decrease in distribution.
The update to the algorithm is Facebook's way to make sure that people are getting to watch longer videos on its platform.
For Facebook, getting more people to watch longer videos, enables it to compete with services like YouTube or even Netflix. But in Facebook's case, videos will appear more often if they make sense to users. With its algorithm update, Facebook is training its users to view longer programs.
As Facebook gradually push out the length of those videos, people will already develop the habitual behavior of seeking long videos.
Its goal is to make users watch full-length videos on Facebook as a natural option.
The second update came less than a week later. On January 31st, Facebook announced another News Feed algorithm update. But this time, the update serves a totally different purpose as it's about focusing on giving more precedence to "authentic and timely stories." This is in line with Facebook's wider effort to fight the spread of fake news on its platform.
What the update does is to introduce new News Feed calculations.
The first is the signal to identify authentic content. To ensure that news are authentic, Facebook is adding new signals into the algorithm to help it determine the authenticity of each post. The qualifiers are based on spam behavior: it identifies a list of Pages that regularly post spam and seek for Likes, comments or shares. Then the posts of the said Page are used as a training model for the algorithm to better identify key traits of misleading posts.
The second is the real-time signals. Facebook is putting more emphasis on timeliness in order to boost the exposure of posts that are gaining a lot of attention in a short amount of time.
This way, Facebook could boost real-time coverage on all post types in order to generate more discussions. This can be useful for live news and live videos, for example.
The last is marketing impacts. Facebook expects the impact to be minor.
What this means, Facebook's algorithm update is putting more emphasis on unique and genuine posts and engagements. So if a post is asking for Likes, comments of shares, it's going to trigger the algorithm's detection and potentially has its reach reduced.
Facebook in updating its News Feed algorithm is nothing new. The company has changed and altered how its News Feed behave to better meet the trend of people in using social media. However, the algorithm's way of ranking posts correspond to the user's preferences "sometimes."
Facebook acknowledges it but declined to be more specific. When they don't match up, the company said, that points to "an area for improvement."
While the impacts can be minimal considering the number of people posting on Facebook, but which so much News Feed materials that are competing to be shown, any change in the algorithm has a potential for a considerable impact.
