Publishers who have relied on Facebook for increasing readership and good stats will have to rethink their strategy as the social media platform changes once again its News Feed ranking algorithm. Now, they’ll take into consideration the amount of time users spend reading an article or watching a clicked video/photo #softwaremagic
“We are adding another factor to News Feed ranking so that we will now predict how long you spend looking at an article in the Facebook mobile browser or an Instant Article after you have clicked through from News Feed,” Facebook stated in a press release.
“We will not be counting loading time towards this — we will be taking into account time spent reading and watching once the content has fully loaded. We will also be looking at the time spent within a threshold so as not to accidentally treat longer articles preferentially.”
The update will take a few weeks to adjust everyone’s News Feed so there’s still time to make Plan B and C and, of course, to curate more carefully the content chosen to be spread on Social Media. One thing’s clear though: content creators are being challenged, more than ever, to bring their best to the table.
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