Once again, Facebook is experimenting with their News Feed. Facebook users have been expressing their frustration on finding more and more over-the-top, (albeit intriguing) headlines in their News Feed, that when clicked on, turn out to be spammy, or at best, articles with low or no substance to them. But Facebook knows its users don’t want to deal with that.
In an attempt to diminish the amount of “clickbait” (spammy article headlines), Facebook is working on tweaking its algorithm for which stories will appear in its News Feed. Facebook announced the switch today, as a response to users pressing for better content to be syphoned to the News Feed. So how is Facebook going to accomplish this change? By employing an increasingly popular internet metric: amount of time spent on a page.
From a blog post in the Facebook newsroom, Facebook employees Joyce Tang and Khalid El-Arini explained, “If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted.”
This seemingly small change will not be insignificant in the social media world. As one of the most influential social publishing platforms, Facebook is a major force for driving traffic to other sites, and generating shared posts through users and their friends. In June 2014, Facebook directed 23% of all social media traffic, with its closest competitor being Pinterest at 5.7%, and then Twitter with 1%, according to Shareaholic.
The time spent metric is growing as a increasingly popular for digital media measurements. The Financial Times, and Upworthy have both incorporated the metric to determine advertising options as well as gage interaction. While time spent will be the major new metric, likes, comments, as well as the ratio of clicks compared to shares will be used in the attempt to improve Facebook’s News Feed.
Facebook has left little room for doubt about the likely effects their changes will have: less traffic for clickbait, and a significant reduction in the amount of clickbait in the News Feed. You can expect to hear the anguished moans of clickbait publishers as they watch their engagement numbers decrease significantly over the next few months. And as to the users who want their News Feed to pick up less spam? They can look forward more content that is actually relevant and substantial popping up in their news Feed. Hopefully, these metric updates will ensure that users get to see more content that they want, and significantly less over-the-top headlines linking to low substance articles.
Source: Mashable