Author: Bree Brouwer / Source: Tubular Insights For years, the success of brands’ advertisements and content on Facebook was predicated o
For years, the success of brands’ advertisements and content on Facebook was predicated on the idea of engagements — how many clicks the content got, how many comments it received, how many likes it generated, etc. But now, there’s a relatively new metric the social media platform started prioritizing: dwell time. This metric has quickly become one of the top considerations for brands and publishers who want to continue finding success on Facebook; here’s a rundown of dwell time and what it means for video content on the social site.
What Is Facebook Dwell Time?
Essentially, dwell time is the total amount of time a user hovered over a particular post or piece of content in their feed, and includes users who have both engaged or not engaged with the content. The longer a particular user keeps their screen frozen on a Facebook video, the longer its dwell time will be. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume “content” refers to any type of video content or ad.
Why Does It Matter?
Dwell time is technically a more accurate way to determine whether or not a particular piece of content was impactful, reached its target audience, or had tangible business results, regardless of engagements or clicks. In fact, Facebook adopted this type of metric because the site found in 2012 through an ROI study with Datalogix that “more than 90% of offline sales come from people who don’t interact with ads during the campaign.”
This surprising statistic disproves the so-called value of click-throughs, clicks, likes, and similar action-based engagement metrics on Facebook. The social media site has even called these types of metrics stand-ins:
“Online engagement metrics are a proxy for interest, but they are not a reliable indicator of the content’s persuasiveness. Persuasive content influences your audience in a way that helps move your business.”
As such, Facebook has been placing more emphasis over the last year on dwell time as it is a better measure of effectiveness and helps prove a user’s actual interest in…
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