Dive Brief:

• Facebook is changing its New Feed algorithm and adding metrics to help it serve users videos they are more likely to watch.
• The new metrics include users’ activating videos, making them full screen and other indicators of interest.
• According to Facebook, the social media network’s users currently view around four billion videos each day.

Dive Insight:

For videos, Facebook is taking into account metrics beyond the usual like, comment and share numbers and adding users activating videos, making them full screen, watching in HD and turning on the sound -- all metrics the social media platform believes indicate interest. The idea behind the move is to serve its users with videos they are more likely to watch and engage with by liking, sharing or commenting on.

In a blog post, Facebook engineering manager Meihong Wan and software engineer Yue Zhuo, added details about new metrics saying, “We are now taking into account more interactions with videos that we have learned indicate whether someone found that video interesting, such as choosing to turn on sound, making the video full screen, and enabling high definition. So if you turn the volume up or make the video full screen, we have updated News Feed to infer you liked the video and will show you similar videos higher up in your News Feed."

Facebook also sent out an email survey asking questions about video in general, and also drilling into live streaming video, as well as questions about a potential acquisition, Meerkat. Facebook users currently view four billion videos each day.

Earlier this month, the social site added "time spent" as a factor to its notoriously complex newsfeed algorithm as a way to measure active engagement with posts. Weighing what inspires more time spent will likely put pressure on marketers to push out the kind of content that will cause users to stay longer.

"We have found that this helps us show people more videos that they are interested in," the Facebook engineers wrote in the blog post Monday.