• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 30, 2015

Determined to get deeper into users’ minds, Facebook is becoming more sensitive to their every move.

Now, in addition to “likes” and the time users spend watching videos, Facebook will consider their choice to turn on a video’s sound -- and watch it in full-screen mode -- when calculating content preferences.

In the simplest terms, the changes to the News Feed ranking system should “help people see more of the videos they care about and fewer of the videos they don’t,” according to a co-authored blog post by Facebook engineers Meihong Wang and Yue Zhuo.

It’s now common practice for Facebook to tweak the algorithm that determines what content users see in their News Feeds. In fact, Facebook only recently began factoring the time users spend viewing stories into its master News Feed algorithm.

While the expressed intent of the changes is always to improve user experience, however, they often result in lowering the organic reach rate of publishers and marketers. 

Facebook also recently implemented another tweak that it said would prioritize personal status updates over other posts, including those from publishers.

With the changes, “Facebook is trying to solve a real problem,” Shaul Olmert, co-founder and CEO of viral content platform Playbuzz, recently told Social Media & Marketing Daily. “Publishers initially banked on the click-through rate from Facebook resulting in people staying on their site longer … But that didn’t happen.”

From a consumer perspective, continuing to improve its user experience remains critical to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has proven why it remains so strong in this space,” Forrester analyst Erna Alfred Liousas recently told Social Media & Marketing Daily. “It continues to improve the user experience.”