FACEBOOK IS LOOKING INTO VIDEO COMPLETION RATES AND HERE’S WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU

The longer videos on your Facebook Page are about to get more love.  

Facebook has been pushing video content for the past year and we have seen the result on our Newsfeeds. It is expected that Facebook will continue to make platform-shaking changes to video in 2017 and major algorithm updates are set to roll out in the next few weeks.

Until this update, Facebook’s mainly used these user signals to decide which videos to show first on user Newsfeeds: 1) how long the video’s watched, 2) whether people turn on sound during viewing, and 3) whether it was fullscreen. These signals might have been favouring shorter videos over longer ones, without accounting for content quality.

To counter this shorter-video bias, Facebook is planning to use a new parameter that will gauge the percent of each video viewed – they’re calling it “percent completion” – to push video content to users. The higher the percentage of a video actually watched, the more the video will be pushed on the Newsfeed.

How people consume video on Facebook is different from their interaction with video on dedicated video-sharing platforms like YouTube or Vimeo; video competes with other forms of content on Facebook for user attention. As Facebook continues to test different ways users interact with and consume videos on the platform, we’re expecting to see more ways the tech giant will pull on the 1.5b existing users and their behaviours to shape the product. It will become easier for users to create and post video content, and also innovative ways they (and their friends) can interact with video. 

What is the ideal length for Facebook videos then?

The best length for a video is whatever length is required to tell a compelling story that engages people, according to Facebook.