Facebook has recently been making a handful of changes and improvements to their apps, including rolling out group voice calls in Messenger on a global scale earlier this week. When it comes to their main application, Facebook had recently started testing weather alerts in the news feed, and although there is no indication that they would roll this out to all users in the future, it’s one way that Facebook has been trying to improve the news feed to perhaps increase engagement. Today Facebook is announcing more new changes to the news feed that are set to start rolling out to users as they try to enhance the experience through what users are seeing when they open up the app.
For a while Facebook has been trying to improve the news feed to show more relevant posts, and although there has likely been a number of users who have enjoyed the changes that have taken root so far, Facebook feels there might be a way to improve things even more, and have stated that they are going to start basing the posts people see in their news feed at the top on time spent viewing certain articles or posts, so the more time you spend viewing a post on a specific topic, you might end up seeing more posts from that page or person, or posts from different pages or people based on that topic or category.
Facebook’s reasoning for testing this method of showing posts is that they want people to see posts that they’re actually interested in. This new element to the news feed ranking will allow Facebook to try and predict the amount of time that users are spending with certain posts that they’ve clicked on, which can then translate to Facebook showing posts to people that they might find more interesting based on viewing something for a longer period of time, or on the reverse side of things, not show posts as often if those users were spending less time looking at a clicked piece of content. Facebook is also going to be making efforts to try and show people a more diverse collection of posts from a wider range of publishers, in attempts to cut down on the number of similar posts people see from the same person, publisher, or group.