Facebook News Feed will now consider the time spent on stories

Facebook will now take into consideration the time you spend on a News Feed item in your Facebook timeline, to show you more relevant updates. Time spent will be the new parameter in addition to actions you take on Facebook such as liking, commenting or sharing a post. According to a post on the Facebook newsroom, actions taken on posts is not always the definitive parameter to judge its importance. Stating its internal research, Facebook arrived at the conclusion that not liking, sharing or commenting on a post has got nothing to do with its importance in most cases. “There are times when, for example, people want to see information about a serious current event, but don’t necessarily want to like or comment on it. Based on this finding, we are updating News Feed’s ranking to factor in a new signal—how much time you spend viewing a story in your News Feed,” said the post. However, the time spent on the story will be taken into consideration as compared to time spent on other stories in the user’s timeline. More time spent on a story indicates that the story is relevant to the user. So say, if you are scrolling through your timeline and happen to stop at a particular article or status or news update or photo, where you take some time to consume that story, Facebook News Feed will take that into consideration. “..we infer that it was something you found interesting and we may start to surface more posts like that higher up in your News Feed in the future,” said Facebook. The feature will be rolled out in the coming weeks.