Facebook video was named by many of the top marketing experts as one of the hot social media trends for 2017. As organic reach has evaporated, brands and businesses have been embracing video on Facebook as a way to increase their reach on the social network.
The result: every day it seems like we’re seeing more and more videos. So Facebook needs a new way to rank all these videos that are vying for our attention in the News Feed.
As usual, Facebook will rely on an engagement metric to do the algorithmic trick.
Facebook to Rank Videos by Percent Completion
Facebook has announced it will be looking at a new News Feed ranking signal for videos: completion rates. According to Facebook:
“One of the signals we look at is ‘percent completion’ — the percent of each video you watch — to help us understand which videos you enjoyed. If you watch most or all of a video, that tells us that you found the video to be compelling — and we know that completing a longer video is a bigger commitment than completing a shorter one. 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.”
Facebook said most pages wont see much change in visibility. However, they noted that it’s possible that “some shorter videos may see a slight dip in News Feed distribution.”
Until now, Facebook has determined the rankings of videos by looking at factors such as:
- Reactions, comments, and shares.
- Whether it was watched with sound on.
- Whether it was watched in full screen.
- How long people watched.
What’s it mean for marketers? Well, make sure that your videos are engaging, whatever the length. Short or long, if people aren’t watching, you will lose visibility.
Check your Facebook video analytics to see how your videos are performing now. If you have a low completion rates, then you better head back to the drawing board with your video strategy and start figuring out how you can start sharing more interesting videos that people will engage with and watch longer.
This video rankings change will start rolling out to all Facebook News Feeds in the coming weeks.
Image Credit: Depositphotos
