Facebook tweaks the News Feed to factor in the time you spend on articles

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Facebook has a shazaming feature

The Facebook News Feed is the central place at which the over 1.6 billion people in the social network interact with content or post their own content to their friends and to the world. Over time, Facebook has added algorithms to the feed so that it displays content that you would interact with and it has been a great way to keep up with news later on even if you are offline for a while.

The NewsFeed is dynamic and Facebook usually observes how people uses it and tweaks it so that it becomes useful to people. The new change this time round is around the time spent reading or watching content on the News Feed.

We are adding another factor to News Feed ranking so that we will now predict how long you spend looking at a article in the Facebook mobile or an Instant Article after you have clicked through from News Feed.

The new algorithm will track how likely you are to click on an article and spending time reading it but won’t be tracking the loading time of the article. You may think that long articles might be favoured in this new change but that is not the case as Facebook assures that longer articles will not be treated preferentially.

Another change they have implemented that is also very useful is increasing the diversity of page posts from several publishers. Currently, if you read posts from a publisher, you will be populated with posts from that publisher in a row. The new change will reduce how often you see and improve the diversity in your News Feed.

Source: Facebook