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Facebook's News Feed Algorithm Further Refined to Show Relevant Videos

Facebook's News Feed Algorithm Further Refined to Show Relevant Videos

By NDTV Correspondent | Updated: 30 June 2015 14:15 IST

Facebook has once again made some changes to its News Feed algorithm, this time in the video section. The company will now personalise the News Feed to prioritise videos to near the top of the feed depending on users' interaction levels with them. Facebook says these changes in its testing resulted in people watching more videos that are relevant to them. The changes take into account more metrics than just likes, comments, or shares.

While last week Facebook had tweaked its News Feed algorithm for videos to take into account whether the user has watched a video, and how long they spend on it, the company has this week started taking into account more user actions to prioritise videos in the News Feed. Last week's update meant that users who watch more videos on their News Feed will see more videos on top of the News Feed, while those that skip them will see less. What this meant for Pages that upload videos is that those videos that users choose to watch will be shared with a larger audience, while those that users ignore will be shown to a smaller one.

With this week's update to its News Feed algorithm for videos, Facebook will is now taking into account user actions like choosing to turn on volume on the video, view it in full screen, or switch to the HD version.

"So if you turn the volume up or make the video full screen, we have updated News Feed to infer you liked the video and will show you similar videos higher up in your News Feed. We have found that this helps us show people more videos that they are interested in," elaborated the Facebook blog post.

Notably, these changes are only relevant to videos uploaded directly to Facebook. The firm added that both sets of changes were made to the News Feed algorithm for videos because metrics such as likes, shares, or comments were not showing the whole picture, and even if users did not interact with a video in that manner, it did not mean the video was not meaningful to them.

Facebook would be rolling out the new interactions tracking function "over the coming weeks" and has mentioned that it does not expect Pages to see significant changes in distribution due to the latest update.

Earlier this month, Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm in the same way to monitor how much time users spend on each post, which in turn decides the posts users are likely to see during Facebook sessions.

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