Facebook will prioritize faster-loading websites on its news feed

Looking to drive steady traffic to your site from Facebook? Better check your load times.

The social giant recently announced that changes to its news feed will favor faster-loading sites. Slow-loading pages will be punished, which probably means lower referral traffic numbers from the platform.

Facebook engineers Jiayi Wen and Shengbo Guo wrote about the update’s details in a blog post:

With this update, we’ll soon take into account the estimated load time of a webpage that someone clicks to from any link in News Feed on the mobile app. Factors such as the person’s current network connection and the general speed of the corresponding webpage will be considered. If signals indicate the webpage will load quickly, the link to that webpage might appear higher in your feed.

The changes are expected to take effect “over the coming months,” according to the blog post, and most pages “won’t see any significant changes” to their referral traffic.

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Even with that assurance, PR and marketing pros should check their load times.

Instagram Stories surpass Snapchat’s

Besides beefing up its news feed’s performance, Facebook is also seeing success through Instagram.

Instagram’s efforts to cut into Snapchat’s dominance in the ephemeral social sharing space seem to be paying off. Initially derided as a Snapchat rip-off, Instagram Stories has surpassed Snapchat. The proof lies in the numbers:

· Snapchat monthly active user rate has dropped from 17.2 percent to 5 percent per quarter.

· Instagram Stories boasts 250 million daily users, while Snapchat attracts 166 million.

· People under 25 years old spend an average of 30 minutes each day on Instagram, and users over 25 years old spend roughly 20 minutes per day on the platform, beating Snapchat’s estimates.

Brand managers are also flocking to Instagram Stories: Half of all brand accounts on Instagram posted to the feature in the last month.

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