How to take advantage of Facebook's focus on longer videos

It's not easy to keep track of the changes in Facebook's news feed algorithm, but it's always useful to stay up to date, as they may affect your Page's performance.

It’s not easy to keep track of the changes to Facebook’s news feed algorithm, but it’s always useful to stay up to date with them, as they may affect the performance of your Facebook Page.

We already know how much Facebook values native videos, and we also believe that 2017 is the year that video will get even bigger in social media. This has given Facebook the incentive to find more ways of highlighting videos in users’ news feeds – this time focusing on videos of longer length.

Why Facebook favors longer video

Facebook has announced that it is planning to rank videos in the newsfeed according to their completion rate, which is the percentage of each video you watch.

This indicates what users like and whether they prefer one video over another. However, Facebook also understands that there is a bigger commitment in completing longer videos, and that’s why it will “weight percent completion more heavily the longer a video is, to avoid penalizing longer videos.”

The change is expected to roll out gradually in the next weeks, which means that this is the right time to consider whether this could affect your Page’s performance.

What this means for Facebook Pages and video publishers

According to Facebook, there won’t be significant changes in video distribution after this algorithm update, but there may be a slight increase in the distribution of longer videos.

This also means that shorter videos may see a dip in news feed distribution, which may require publishers to rethink their strategy for Facebook videos.

There have been many examples up to now of short and engaging Facebook videos, but as the platform is now encouraging publishers to create longer videos, we can expect a change in terms of video publishing and thus, a change in video consumption.

6 tips for effective longer videos

It’s not easy to create a long but engaging video, so it may be useful to keep these tips in mind:

  1. The video should be extremely relevant to your target audience
  2. Make sure you grab the users’ attention in the first seconds, and keep it throughout the video
  3. Take into consideration users who watch muted videos, and add captions or subtitles to enhance the video’s message
  4. Don’t try too hard to create longer videos if you feel that you don’t have the right story to tell
  5. Be authentic; embrace your brand’s genuine branding through the creation of unique campaigns
  6. Don’t forget to monitor the video’s insights to get a better understanding of what makes a successful video for your target audience.

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