Facebook to push longer videos on its News Feed

The platform's latest updates also include a new secure way of logging in.

Social networking giant, Facebook has announced a change in its algorithm connected to the videos that show up on a user's timeline. Now, longer videos watched for more time will be given more priority in the ranking of the News Feed.

In its official newsroom blog, the company announced that they are changing the way they rank videos in News Feed 'to adjust the value we give to how much of a video is watched.' It adds, "One of the signals we look at is "percent completion" - the percent of each video you watch - to help us understand which videos you enjoyed. If you watch most or all of a video, that tells us that you found the video to be compelling - and we know that completing a longer video is a bigger commitment than completing a shorter one. As we continue to understand how our community consumes video, we've realized that we should therefore weight percent completion more heavily the longer a video is, to avoid penalizing longer videos."

Though this doesn't impact the views of shorter videos, it enables Facebook to be more inclusive towards preferences of users who watch longer videos. "The best length for a video is whatever length is required to tell a compelling story that engages people, which is likely to vary depending on the story you're telling," adds the post.

This change is being rolled out gradually, and will impact user timelines over the coming weeks. Currently, for its publishers, its main competitor for videos- YouTube, categorises videos based on watch time. And, while the latter offers pre-roll ads, Facebook is reportedly testing mid-roll ads, which appear only after 90 seconds.

Facebook has also added a new way to log in to accounts, using security keys. This is done to negate the phishing scams that target user passwords, irrespective of whether they access the network from their phone or PC.

With security keys, users can access Facebook by tapping the physical key plugged into their computing device at the time, to further authenticate identity after punching in the password. At present, USB security keys are compatible with the Chrome and Opera web browsers, and with near field communication (NFC) compatible Android smartphones. The use of this feature requires users to purchase a physical USB security key device.