Facebook's Redesign

By now many of you will have either heard about or noticed Facebook’s latest redesign. Facebook has made photos for users bigger, but the ads in the news feed are also going to be getting bigger. Facebook are hoping that Pages may get more views as a result of this. Thanks largely to the “Following Feed” – that said, there will also be Page-less feeds on Facebook now.

The design changes will affect advertisers in a variety of ways. Facebook will now give more space in the central feed for photos having cleaned up its UI. The photos will be bigger when businesses buy feed ads that feature a photo moving forward. They are hoping that this might lure more luxury brands who are generally used to glossy magazine ads and homepage treatment.

Users will now be able to choose between different feeds which are content specific. This could potentially benefit or hurt business Pages. It will all depends on which feeds a user frequents. ‘Following’ is the new term given to the Pages-only feed. Users will see all the updates from the Pages they Like and the public figures they’ve subscribed to. Pages and professional content-creating individuals could benefit considerably from this as before, their followers would only see the best of their updates. This was due to the way Facebook filters the default news feed. This will allow people to have a better way of finding them.

Where this might run into trouble is that there are now areas of Facebook where potentially no Pages or public figures will be displayed. Obviously, the Friends-Only feed could specifically be problematic for businesses. If users choose to frequent that, they could be free to Like Pages to show off their interests or personalize third-party apps, but not have to see their feed updates.

What this means at the end of the day is that users have considerably more choice. Seeing content from business is easier now than it was before. And if they don’t, they can easily bypass them – not good for business. So while businesses might not favour this, the update will most likely see people spend longer periods of time on Facebook and improve the overall experience. This should allow additional opportunities to hit the end user each day.