Facebook officially jumped to the livestreaming business on September ushering the entry of the largest social network in this rapidly growing segment. Focus on providing livestreaming services heated up last year with the entry of Periscope, the Twitter owned social network which made it easier to create livestreams and share it to your network.
Apart from YouTube, Facebook was the other sleeping giant that could be a huge influence in the livestream segment largely due to its huge 1.6 billion active users base. It started rolling out livestreaming slowly, first to verified users on iOS then to all verified pages and recently rolled it out to Android users in the US.
Its use on Facebook has made the company notice something interesting. Due to their “live nature”, people were spending more than thrice the amount of time on it than the usual videos on the News Feed. This is because Live Videos are interesting and you won’t like to miss out on the broadcast being fed on your News Feed.
Thanks to this unique trend, Facebook decided to make an update to the News Feed where they said that: “Facebook Live videos are more likely to appear higher in News Feed when those are actually live compared to after they are no longer live.”
You may assume that this update will make some Pages have a sudden spike in traffic but thanks to how the News Feed algorithm is designed, that won’t be the case. Facebook is tracking how people use the Livestream feature on its platform and expect more changes like this in the future.
