Facebook Tweaks News Feed Again To Show Articles You Really Want To See

Facebook has a habit of regularly tweaking the News Feed to ensure that users are always shown content that’s most relevant to them and it’s something that they’re really interested in. Today the world’s largest online social network announced that it has tweaked News Feed again to show articles that you really want to see. This update is part of Facebook’s Feed Quality Program which is a big initiative it’s working on to significantly improve the News Feed experience for its billion-plus users.

Facebook is seeing time people choose to spend reading or watching content they clicked on from News Feed as an important signal that the content interested them. It’s now added another factor to News Feed ranking which predicts how long users will spend looking at an article in the Facebook mobile browser or an Instant Articles after they’ve clicked through from News Feed.

This new factor will also take into account how likely the user is to click on an article and then spend time reading it, loading time will not be counted against this, it’s only going to count time spent reading the article and watching once the content has been loaded completely. Time spent will be looked at within a threshold so that longer articles are not accidentally treated preferentially.

Facebook will be able to better understand which articles might be interesting to users with this change, which means that users will then be more likely to see stories in their News Feed that they actually want to read. This News Feed tweak is rolling out now and will go live for all of its users in the coming weeks.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: Facebook