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Facebook announced that it will introduce a new metric in studying user behavior and tweaking our News feed once more.
The metric includes how much time you spend hovering on a certain post on your News feed, regardless of the fact that you will not actively interact with it through the conventional like button, share it, or comment upon the said post.
The new metric will soon enter into force, so all of us can analyze the impact Facebook’s new gimmick has on our News feed page. From friend’s statuses to articles and feed from the liked pages or apps, everything will change according to the new behavior analyzing tool implemented by Facebook.
Ansha Yu, as well as Sami Tas, software engineers at Facebook, posted a blog statement that explained the reasoning behind the new tweak:
“Just because someone didn’t like, comment or share a story in their News Feed doesn’t mean it wasn’t meaningful to them. 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”.
Therefore, prepare that if you spend a little more time reading a title of an article and its caption as it is, or watching the first few seconds of an automatically played video, Facebook algorithms will interpret it as a good thing and a new interest.
No clicking or other form of acknowledgment is required. The simple amount of time spent on the post will indicate your interest. If you didn’t scroll right away past a certain feed on your page, chances are the next session on Facebook will bring about an increased surfacing of feeds like that in your News feed.
The data gathered on users’ time spent on certain posts will not be shared to either publishers or advertisers according to Facebook. The new metric simply measures how to better surface content on each user’s News feed.
The new feature is an added effort to plunge into deep learning that helps Facebook recognize certain specifics in its users. To what extent, it is still unclear. Perhaps to come to Facebook users’ help or simply due to active interest in technological developments and evermore performant machine learning processes.
Either way, the new metric might come as a pleasant surprise for publishers that have recently struck a deal for Facebook to directly host stories on the Instant Articles platform.
Beyond the conventional metrics used to assess user interest, publishers such as New York Times might be greatly interested in how much time a user spends on a certain story even if it doesn’t click on it or share it.
Image Source: siliconangle.com
