Facebook wants to become your favorite Internet TV by tracking what a television never could. Today it announced a News Feed algorithm change that will show you more videos similar to ones you expand to full-screen, un-mute or opt to watch in HD, even if you don’t Like, share or comment. Those same signals will tell Facebook that a video is enjoyable so the News Feed shows it to more people.
The more Facebook understands which videos are great and which are boring to which people, the faster it will grow its view count, which has already reached 4 billion per day.
Just a few weeks ago, Facebook’s algorithm started factoring in how long you linger looking at posts and videos. Together with the new change, just pumping video content into Facebook won’t get you very far. Clips must be visually tantalizing from their first second, and vivid even when silent as that’s how they play unless you click. To get more News Feed visibility and reach, they’ll now have to be so interesting that people watch them to the end in full-screen in HD.
The update comes just after Facebook overhauled its video analytics offering for Pages. Instead of having to export data to Excel, Page admins now have a dashboard to track views of all videos they’ve shared, measure auto-plays versus click-to-plays, compare time periods, and see their top videos by performance so they know what to share more of.