Facebook News Feed Ranking Now Takes These Video Actions Into Account

Facebook announced a new change to how it shows content in News Feed on Monday. It will now start taking into account the actions users take on videos when determining when to show a video to people.

Specifically, it will look at when users choose to turn on sound, make a video full screen, or enable high definition. The thinking is that even if a user doesn’t like, share, or comment on a video, actions such as these are a good indication that the video is of interest to them.

“We have previously made updates to News Feed that take into account whether someone has watched a video and for how long they watched it, so people who tend to watch videos in News Feed will see more videos higher up in their News Feed, and people who watch fewer videos will see videos further down,” Facebook engineers Meihong Wang and Yue Zhuo say in a joint blog post. “With this update, we want to show people more of the types of videos they want to see, and fewer of the videos they don’t.”

“Many people have told us that they enjoy watching videos in News Feed but don’t always feel inclined to like, comment or share them,” they add. “For example, you may have found a video from a nonprofit you follow on Facebook to be really informative and you’re glad you saw it but it’s not something you felt inclined to like, comment on or share more broadly.”

Long stor short, if you take any of the actions on a video as described above, Facebook is more likely to show you similar types of videos higher up in your News Feed going forward.

The change has begun rolling out, and will continue to do so over the coming weeks. The company says it doesn’t expect Pages to see significant changes in distribution because of the update.

Last week, Facebook announced the addition of a new Videos tab to Page Insights, enabling Page admins to see views and 30-second views at the Page level, top videos within a certain date range, and metrics for videos shared from other Pages.

Two weeks ago, Facebook announced a News Feed change that takes into account how long users look at a story.