Longer Facebook Videos To Get Higher Rankings According To New Changes

Facebook is heavily investing on its Videos feature, diverting focus and resources away from Live, which was once the darling of the social media company’s CEO. The site recently made some changes with regards to how the Videos are going to be ranked, with Facebook deciding that longer clips deserve to rank higher.

The slight tweak that Facebook made to its ranking system makes it so longer content becomes more likely to show up on the news feeds of users, TechCrunch reports. This could be attributed to the social media site’s goal of having users become accustomed to watching longer videos and forcing content creators to make interesting content.

On that note, other factors for ranking Videos are still relevant. There’s still the matter of how often users watch the video in its entirety, if they sound is turned on or muted, and if the video is watched more often in high definition.

Before the changes, Facebook noticed some discrepancy when it came to the rankings that negatively impacted longer videos. It specifically had to do with the ranking percentage that applied to video completion since shorter videos would obviously be easier to watch in full.

In order to correct the imbalance, some tweaks in the algorithm had to be made. In a blog post that Facebook put up to announce the changes, the company explains exactly what the tweaks will affect, especially where longer videos come in.

“As we continue to understand how our community consumes video, we've realized that we should therefore weight percent completion more heavily the longer a video is, to avoid penalizing longer videos.”

Recode makes note of the languages that the post uses in order to justify the changes, purposefully avoiding saying that Facebook wants to endorse viewing longer videos. This isn’t surprising given what the site is reportedly trying to achieve.