Facebook Live Video To Appear In News Feeds

Facing off against Snapchat, Twitter’s Periscope and other streaming services, Facebook is going crazy for live video.

The social giant is tweaking its algorithm so that Facebook Live videos are now more likely to appear in users’ News Feeds.

“We do not expect Pages to see significant changes as a result of this update,” Vibhi Kant, a product manager at Facebook, notes in a new blog post.

Kant, however, does expect the change to produce more active engagement among Facebook's roughly 1.5 billion monthly active users. “People spend more than (three times) more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live,” according to Kant.

Facebook only began testing live video-streaming late last year. Then, in January, it expanded the ability to share live video to iPhone users in more than 30 countries.

Just last week, all domestic Android users were invited to join the live-streaming party, while Facebook announced plans to bring in Android users around the world.

Driven by video and mobile, Facebook is now on track to rake in roughly $12.14 billion in U.S. digital ad revenues by 2017, according to a recently revised forecast from eMarketer.

While the researcher expects Google to remain the leader in mobile through 2017, Facebook’s share is growing at a higher rate, and the gap is expected to narrow slightly over the next several years.

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