Facebook Will Push Live Videos to the Top of News Feeds

Facebook is reconfiguring the News Feed so that Live broadcasts appear at the top.

Why? According to Facebook’s official blog post, “Over the last three months Facebook Live video has become more and more popular and more and more people and Pages are creating and watching live videos.”

The post also claimed that, “People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live. This is because Facebook Live videos are more interesting in the moment than after the fact.”

For this reason, Facebook quickly realized that live videos had to be considered differently than normal videos, or stated differently, handled as a different type of content. Given this, the company is in a learning process of how to best rank live videos for its users as was the process with all preceding content additions introduced to the News Feed.

For example, with normal video, the company began with the basics of how many people watched a video and how long they watched it for, but then became attuned to other indicative factors such as choosing to watch it with sound or viewing it in full screen mode.

As of now, Facebook claims Pages will not be affected as result of this update and will continue to observe the response to the improved ranking of Live videos and post updates to the News Feed FYI blog.

Facebook also wrote, “Facebook Live is currently available for verified Pages and public figures using Mentions. We do not expect Pages to see significant changes as a result of this update.”

Here’s an example from U.S. Soccer’s Facebook page

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