This week Facebook announced a new tweak to News Feed that favors pages that post video regularly. We’ve known for some time that Live Video and Video posts have been favored in the feed, but for the first time Facebook is actively prioritizing content from pages that have proven to be regular providers of quality video.
Intent matters
With this update, if you’re a Page that users actively seek out either through Search or by going straight to your page, your video posts will be favored in News Feed. The assumption by News Feed is that your users “intend” to consume video, and are therefore seeking you out with that purpose in mind; you, the video provider.
Viewership matters
Also with this update, videos with a lot of repeat views will organically rise to the top of peoples’ News Feed, as well as videos from pages that seem to have a frequent, routine publishing schedule for video.
What does this mean?
It means that not all videos are now automatically at the top of the stack. Videos with repeat views and an assumed viewership will now be preferred by News Feed. So…
- Post Consistently – Post at least some video every day and/or every week. Make it standard operating procedure to hit a regular posting goal. Create a routine around posting video.
- Study and Curate – Go into your Post Manager and study your video engagement. Figure out what kinds of video are getting the most views and build your regular posting goals around producing more of that. Does your daily weather update get no love on nice (read “boring”) weather days? Maybe it’s time to abandon that initiative and try something else. A weekly prep sports roundtable maybe?
The time to “try anything” seems to be coming to an end. It’s time to figure out what your strengths are as a video provider and stick to them. I think it was Yogi Berra who said you should do something until you shouldn’t do it anymore. (If you don’t know who that is, just pretend I said Shia LaBeouf.)
But wait, there’s more!
Well, not really. But here’s the whole blog post from Facebook where they go into more detail about the change. The nitty-gritty deals more with content providers who are selling ad opportunities on their videos, and concerning content providers who are publishing content under the new(ish) Watch product. Are you considering publishing content on the Watch platform? We’d love to hear from you at support@socialnewsdesk.com.
