Facebook News Feed algorithm will now track time you spend on a story

To show more relevant updates, Facebook announced that it has tweaked the algorithm that decides what users see on their news feed on the social network. The algorithm will now also factor in time users spend on a news feed item on their timeline.

The social networking site primarily relied on actions like liking, commenting or sharing a post, to determine News Feed ranking. However, as a part of its research to improve News Feed, Facebook realized that these factors don’t always tell the whole story of what is most meaningful, as per the company’s official blog post. “From this research, we learned that in many cases, just because someone didn’t like, comment or share a story in their News Feed doesn’t mean it wasn’t meaningful to them,” the blog said.

The algorithm will do much more than only measure the number of seconds spent by user on each story. “Some people may spend 10 seconds on a story because they really enjoy it, while others may spend 10 seconds on a story because they have a slow Internet connection,” as per the blog post.

“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,” the post further said.

Facebook has already started rolling out the change and will continue to do so in the coming weeks.