On Thursday, Facebook announced that it will start using time spent reading or viewing content on third-party pages as a factor in its news feed ranking algorithm.
This update to ranking will take into account how likely you are to click on an article and then spend time reading it.”
Facebook will also try to avoid too many posts from the same page that are together in a row in people’s News Feed.
We anticipate that most Pages won’t see any significant changes. Some Pages might see a small increase in referral traffic, and some Pages might see minor decreases”, Facebook said
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Among the many factors Facebook takes into account when ranking items on a user’s News Feed are who posted the item, when it was posted, the type of content published and how other users have interacted with such posts. Each factor plays a part in the unique relevancy score Facebook’s algorithm assigns to News Feed posts for each user, according to vice president of product management Adam Mosseri.
Thus, Facebook will now make an attempt to predict how long people spend viewing a piece of content.