The social media industry has been abuzz this week in anticipation of today’s News Feed redesign announcement from Facebook. Speculation has been wild, rumors were rampant, and stock prices were popping before Zuck took the stage. News Feed has been Facebook’s heart and soul since its introduction in 2006, and aside from small tweaks and new content such as Open Graph action stories and sponsored stories, it’s remained largely unchanged until today.
So what’s new? The revamp can be summarized with 4 concepts: Bigger, Richer, Personalized, and Consistent.
It’s Bigger
It has always seemed a bit strange that News Feed is where we do the vast majority of our browsing, discovery, and communication, yet it only takes up a small portion of our desktop browser. Tablets and Mobile let the Feed take up most of your device’s real estate, but the old desktop web Feed always seemed like it was failing to capitalize on where our eyeballs spent the most time. And now that’s all changed:
Do you notice what now takes up the vast majority of your screen? The space you care most about. The space where you interact with your friends. And the space where brands’ voices and visuals are most likely to reach you on Facebook.
If you’re a brand, then your Facebook strategy should already be well in line with this redesign. For over a year, Team Zuck has been pushing the idea that News Feed is where the best engagement occurs, and that brands need to always be publishing quality content posts, letting users create Open Graph action stories about their brand properties, and strategizing about how to increase their fan counts. This redesign will only increase the engagement disparity between News Feed and other locations (Timeline, right-hand-side ad modules), and make your brand a winner if your focus is on generating News Feed stories with the best content for your audiences, whether via Facebook’s native tools, or social publishing and Open Graph integration suites such as Thismoment’s Distributed Engagement Channel (DEC) platform.
It’s Richer
With increased real estate comes the opportunity for larger visuals, and as we’ve seen in the higher engagement for photo posts on Facebook, larger visuals means more eyeballs and more clicks. Zuck began today’s presentation by demonstrating how much photo publishing has taken over Facebook; these days around 50% of posts are photos.
With the redesign, photo posts are now huge, as are the images that lead to embed and video playback — a boon for platforms like DEC that feature publishing rich media embedded content into friends’ and fans’ News Feeds. Photos also now feature their caption text overlaying the photo itself, giving more room for other posts in the feed and making the entire UI feel far more like a wall of rich imagery as opposed to a wall of text. It’s very likely this caption-overlay behavior is a major reason behind Facebook’s recent rule that ad images can only contain 20% text; Facebook wants to avoid nasty situations in which 2 sets of text are conflicting on top of one another.
Likewise, link posts get larger thumbnails and descriptions, and it looks like verified news publishers will have their logos featured too. This positions Facebook against other news aggregators as a strong news resource with some distinct network effect differentiators.
Last but definitely not least, Page Like stories will now be visually richer, showing not only the Page profile pic, but also its cover photo and a few other small thumbnails. If you don’t have a beautiful cover photo on your brand’s Page, upload one today.
And as stated earlier, brands should already be prioritizing the publishing of high quality, content rich posts to their fans. With the new design, posts that are simple text will get far less real estate, and as a likely result they’ll incur far less engagement than photo, video, embedded media, and link posts. There’s also a new importance to making your cover photo eye-catching, since now it can appear in News Feeds. If you don’t have a strong process and platform for organizing all your brand’s media international and segmented resources into an enterprise-wide social-friendly repository, now’s the time to start… otherwise your plain text posts will leave you in the dust.
Personalization: Everything In Its Right Place
Some users have complained that the old News Feed algorithms fail to provide them with all the friend-based content that made them fall in love with Facebook years ago. Some folks might like the ability to claim offers or see brand-voiced content in their Feeds, but others just want a veritable jet stream of unfiltered, chronological posts from all of their friends. Facebook has been listening, and has added an easy-to-find option to choose different Feed filters.
On desktop browsers, the list can be found in the upper right corner, while on mobile the list slides down from a nifty pull-down menu at the top of the screen. Personalized feeds include:
- All Friends – A chronologically ordered feed of every post made by your friends. For those of you who only ever want Facebook to be a place to communicate with friends, this is your solution. It may not display brand content, but it’s likely that brands will still get a little face time in this context via stories of users who liked a Page, Open Graph stories, and more.
- Photos – This Feed shows only photos published by your friends, liked Pages, and subscribed users. With the new big real estate, the view is rich and beautiful, and emphasizes the brand strategy of posting with a photo whenever possible.
- Music – This feed has already been around in different iterations, but now FB is giving it a lot more prominence in the UI. Musician Page Posts will be featured, along with Open Graph listen stories and concert events.
- Following – This feed chronologically lists all posts made by Pages you’ve liked and Profiles to which you’ve subscribed. This directly addresses a lot of brands’ complaints that, without sponsored posts, their messaging is reaching a smaller subset of fans than it used to. While effective sponsored post budgets, optimized targeting, and excellent content should still be a part of every brand’s strategy, this creates one more opportunity for publications, celebrities, sports teams, and brands to reach fans.
One thing the press conference did not mention was the likelihood that, with the new designs and unfiltered News Feed types, the Ticker may no longer need to exist. The Ticker has always been a firehose of all friend/page activity, but it doesn’t map well to mobile environments. Facebook touts its mobile-first strategy, so the multiple-feed-types solution allows them to keep growing the visual size of News Feed without sacrificing the Ticker’s original purpose.
It’s Consistent
Facebook is a mobile-first company, but they are also quite serious about achieving a unified user experience across all types of devices. FB’s mobile/tablet apps have felt quite different from the desktop experience for some time, but no longer… The full court press on News Feed, coupled with marginalizing left/right side options and navigation into skinnier zones, means that News Feed can now feel consistent across phones, tablets, and desktop browsers.
VP of Product Chris Cox also gave a big plug for responsive design during his part of the presentation, describing Facebook’s goal of ensuring that the same rich content was presented to the user regardless of their medium. This falls perfectly in line with trends we’ve seen from other key brand destinations like YouTube, who recently announced their responsive OneChannel redesign. Thismoment has been pushing responsive design philosophies for awhile (one of our clients was a featured launch partner with the OneChannel announcement), and we’ve been passionate about designing our platform to be the perfect tool for build-once / render-everywhere dynamic brand experiences. We’re really excited to see the web embracing responsive and adaptive design, and we’re sure this will improve user experiences while saving marketers a boatload of money that typically would be spent separately building mobile, tablet, and multi-viewport implementations.
What Next?
The new design has not yet publicly launched, but you can see it in action and get on the preview waitlist here: http://www.facebook.com/about/newsfeed. It’s likely that some Timeline design tweaks may also come along for the ride when the final launch occurs — FB is a stickler for consistent design language across its product — but as long as your brand is focused on publishing visually rich, high-quality content and letting your fans generate Open Graph stories through brand-friendly applications, you’ll be excellently positioned for this exciting evolution.
- Jonathan Eccles
Product Manager, Social Integrations
