Facebook has recently announced a new update that will influence people’s News Feeds. While it seems like something that should have been a factor for a long time, the amount of time people spend look at or interacting with a post will determine what they see in the future. The longer you spend on a given post, the more Facebook will try to show you similar items.
So, for example, if you spend a lot of time looking at political posts, your News Feed is likely to see more of those than ever. If videos of funny cats take up a lot of your time, you’ll see more of those.
While Facebook claims that this is not going to make any major impact to what people are currently seeing, it is one factor that people will want to keep in mind. Marketers, for example, may be able to benefit their long term Facebook presence by posting things that can hold people’s attention for longer such as a video or interesting story.
In a blog post from Facebook, two Facebook software engineers said, “When talking to people about the way they use their News Feed, we’ve found that it’s not as simple as just measuring the number of seconds you spend on each story to understand if that piece of content resonated with you. Some people may spend ten seconds on a story because they really enjoy it, while others may spend ten seconds on a story because they have a slow internet connection. We’ve discovered that if people spend significantly more time on a particular story in News Feed than the majority of other stories they look at, this is a good sign that content was relevant to them.”
So, try to come up with ways you can improve the length of time your visitors are spending on each of your posts and you will likely see some increased traffic on your Facebook pages or posts.
