Facebook Changes its Primary Metric to ‘Views’ for Photos

Facebook is making “views” its primary metric for photos, text posts, and videos.

In a post on Thursday, Facebook announced that views would be its primary metric to measure the performance of content on the social media platform.

Views will be measured not just on video content but also on photos, text posts, Reels, and Stories.

“Views streamlines the various unique content distribution metrics into one, helping you understand how well your content is resonating regardless of format or Meta platform,” Facebook writes in the announcement.

“Views also capture when people look at your content multiple times, telling you more about how interesting or entertaining it is.”

For photos, Stories, or text posts on Facebook, views will replace Impressions. For these non-video formats, views will be calculated as the number of times they appear on a person’s screen, including repeat views.

So for example, a person viewing a photo three separate times in the same day would count as three views for that photo instead of one impression. This means Facebook users will notice that their views are higher than their previous impression counts.

Views will also tell users the number of times a Reel or video was played or the number of times photo or text posts were on screen.

On Reels and videos, plays will now be called views. The calculation of views will stay the same, so no major changes to this metric are anticipated, except for the new name. Additionally, the separate replays metric will be removed as part of Facebook’s update.

The announcement comes a few months after Instagram announced that it was switching to “Views” as its primary focus metric.

Meta appears to be encouraging creators to re-focus on reach instead of the traditional metric of followers and likes with content. For some time now, Instagram has been working to re-frame how creators prioritize different metrics, in order to shift the focus off of follower counts.

Previously, Instagram’s algorithm was primarily focused around the creators that a user had chosen to follow. However, now an Instagram user’s main feed is largely dominated by content they don’t follow, but that Meta’s AI-driven algorithm has selected for a user. Hence, this may be why views is becoming more important as a metric for Meta.

 
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.