A few days ago, Facebook finally made its Live Video feature available for Android users. Well, at least in the US for now. But unless you subscribe to a page’s Live feed, then you wouldn’t know that they were broadcasting, well, live, right now. That is why the social networking giant is fixing its feed algorithm (for the nth time) and making Live broadcasts a priority on your timeline. You will soon see that on top of your News Feed, all the videos happening ATM (at the moment, if you didn’t know) will take precedence over everything else.
Facebook’s algorithm has long been criticized for what it deems as a priority that you should see. But this time around, this change makes sense because what is the point of a Live broadcast if you actually don’t see it live. Previously, when it comes to videos, what FB usually does is to take into account how many people watched the video and how long they actually watched it. They also later on figured out that if a person turns on the sound or makes it to full screen, then it means they must be really interested.
But now that Live Video is slowly gaining traction, not just for pages and celebrities, they are categorizing it as a new content type (as compared to “normal” videos). They are changing how they rank Live videos and so now you will most likely see them higher than those that are not actually live. According to their stats, people spend more than 3x more time watching videos live than just on a later broadcast.
Since Facebook Live is only available for now for verified pages and celebrities and a few chosen users, there will probably not be such a significant change on your news feed. But once it goes, well, live for most users, expect a lot more Live videos on your newsfeed.
SOURCE: Facebook
