What Brands Need To Know About Facebook's News Feed Redesign
Mar 8, 2013, 00:41 IST
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There are some interesting aspects that brands should note.
Business Insider's Owen Thomas live blogged the event and reported that one reason CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave for why the news feed had to change was, "Photos have gone from 20 percent of News Feed content to 50 percent. Page posts from brands and public figure have gone from 15 percent to 25 percent."
One of the first things noteworthy changes is that photos and videos will be bigger. Videos will now take up the full width and have the ability to play within the feed.
“Advertisers want really rich things like big pictures or videos, and we haven’t provided those things historically,” Zuckerberg said on his last earnings call. Successful social media marketing is often very visual, so this is an important change. Furthermore, the News Feed will be separated into different categories including a chronological friends feed (that reads more like Twitter) and a "Following" feed that chronicles posts from brands, publications, and businesses users follow — also in chronological order. This move addresses criticisms that Facebook's News Feed algorithm, which many refer to as Edgerank, was hiding some posts from followers. Before, all brand posts were in confined to the "Pages Feed" on the right side of the news feed. Only a small percentage of posts from companies were ever actually seen by users. But the brand posts will still be sequestered from the friends-only feed, which could be detrimental to advertisers if users only care about the people, rather than companies, they follow.