Facebook is Changing the Way They Rank Videos
Facebook is one of the most widely accessed websites on the internet right now. It is a great way of connecting with people regardless of their distance and it’s a great way of putting out content that you want to be shared. Everyone is using Facebook with a majority of the people accessing the social media giant on their mobile phones.
It is fair to say Facebook is one of the best ways to get noticed on the internet, for good or for worse.
Anyway, at the end of 2016, a majority of marketing specialists and analysts have stated that Facebook Videos are among the hottest trends of 2016. With this revelation, more and more Businesses have begun embracing Facebook as their primary source of multimedia content sharing platform.
BuzzFeed is one of the most famous examples of big companies that primarily use Facebook to disseminate their content. They share a cooking video at least once or twice a day and with these, their stats skyrocketed with more and more people sharing their content with each passing day.
Anyway, companies like BuzzFeed have proven that Facebook is one of the most convenient platforms to expand their reach. With this change, however, more and more videos are uploaded to Facebook every day; the dilemma is that Facebook needs a better way to rank these videos in order to promote the quality ones and purge the spammy videos that don’t abide by Facebook’s guidelines.
Facebook has announced, however, that they will be relying on an engagement metric to do the complex calculations for them – and I think it’s brilliant.
Facebook Will Rank Videos Depending on the Total “Percentage Completion” Watched
According to Abhishek Bapna (Product Manager) and Seyoung Park (Research Scientist) over at the Facebook Newsroom Page, FB will begin ranking videos based on percent completion which they define as “the percent of each video [you] watch.”; furthermore, this is simply one of the many signals that they are looking out for in order to rank FB videos appropriately.
Simply put, your Facebook videos will be ranked according to how long people watch your video. If they watch it into completion, then your page will be rewarded accordingly. Of course, if a majority of the people who watch your video leave it halfway through then your content will be given the appropriate demerits.
Of course, Facebook is also looking into expanding their metrics especially with relation to videos that are naturally longer in nature. While the changes have been made, they did also mention that the new ranking system is still a work in progress. This means that we may be seeing more changes in the future.
Will This Affect Your Page?
The short answer is “Yes”.
A majority of the pages on Facebook will not see any significant changes but pages that primarily distribute video content will see a lot of changes. This is also true for people who spend a majority of their time watching videos on Facebook.
People who like watching longer videos on Facebook will find more videos of similar length scattered across their newsfeed; at the same time, shorter videos will be replaced by the longer ones. The opposite is also true, in this case, so if you enjoy watching shorter videos, then Facebook will show you more videos of a shorter duration.
Anyway, my advice for all of you is “don’t panic”. These changes aren’t anything new especially if you’ve been following the SEO scene for a while now. So long as you keep your videos engaging and relevant to your niche, then people will naturally watch your content for as long as you keep them engaged.
Longer videos that people ignore will be culled from Facebook’s newsfeeds, giving more weight to videos that are actually watched to completion.
As much as possible, make your videos only as long as you need them to be. Try to find your own center when it comes to storytelling and eventually, you’ll be releasing quality videos naturally! Don’t believe me? Then give my YouTube guide a try, who knows, it may actually help you out!
