Facebook’s New News Feed: What Does It mean For Your Business?

On March 7th, Facebook unveiled its redesigned News Feed home page at a press conference in Menlo Park.
The new look focuses on images, making posts larger and more detailed, with different feeds displaying different types of content. The new design is also consistent across all devices, both desktop and mobile, and was influenced by the current Facebook News Feed on phones and tablets. So, the new News Feed has bigger images, different feeds and less clutter, but what does this mean for businesses promoting themselves on Facebook?

How it looks:

There are several distinct News Feeds that users can switch between: All Friends, Close Friends, Photos, Following, Music, Games and Groups. Stories from All Friends, Following and Photos are displayed chronologically, with the most recent at the top. There is an omnipresent black toolbar on the left-hand side of the screen, with all the usual tabs: Messages, Events, Pages, Apps etcetera. On the right-hand side of the page are sections containing suggestions, the user’s likes, top rated selections and the opportunity to rate other content, dependent on which feed is selected.

The redesigned News Feed is focused on images, as images now make up around 50% of the content on the current News Feed. Picture and video stories are enlarged and expanded: if a friend’s profile picture is changed, the new one will take up about half the width of the user’s page on desktop devices and the entire width on mobile devices. If an album is uploaded then one photo will be highlighted and enlarged, with others surrounding it.



In fact, all stories, regardless of whether they are image-centric, have been enlarged. Shared pages are announced with a preview of the page in question, consisting of the page’s cover image and profile picture. The first few sentences of articles which are shared in the News Feed are visible, alongside the title and a thumbnail photo (if the article has one). All the stories are displayed alongside a photo of the person who shared it, surrounded by a speech bubble-style box.

What this means for businesses:

The benefits of the redesign for businesses are obvious: a wider timeline means more space for Sponsored Stories and the focus on visual content gives marketers the opportunity to get creative with their use of images. A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed to Mashable that Sponsored Stories will still appear in the new News Feed, just as they do in the current version.

The focus on images and videos could herald the appearance of video ads in the News Feed. Last December, Facebook reportedly began developing a video advertising service which will autoplay in the news feed, regardless of the user’s activity on the site. Although the invasive nature of the proposed service was condemned by both Facebook users and the press, pop-up video advertising could still prove successful if the content is well targeted and of a high quality.

The News Feed’s consistency across all devices means that marketers won’t need to create different adverts for desktop and mobile devices, saving them money and time, but not effecting their eventual impressions figures. The autoplay video advertising service is also reported to be consistent across both mobile and desktop devices.



The introduction of new distinct micro-feeds – All Friends, Close Friends, Photos, Following, Music, Games and Groups – provides marketers with new targeting options. For example, a Sponsored Story advertising a social gaming company could be posted solely on the Games feed, while an advert for a new album release could be posted on the Music feed.

However, users can choose to only see the content that their friends are posting in the All Friends and Close Friends tabs. If marketers advertise in these feeds they will have to be careful not to be too invasive: users will go on the two Friends feeds for a personal experience, not to be hassled by advertising.

In fact, the onus is on users to actively want to view the advertising of the brands they follow in the Following tab. Marketers will have to ensure that the content they post in the News Feed is entertaining enough to keep their followers’ attention. The micro-feeds will have benefits and detriments to marketers, senior social strategist Mauricio Aguayo told Mashable:

With most changes like this, it is always going to affect some people positively and some negatively. The user is now much more in control about what they want to see and they will be much more prone to engage with it because they've in essence raised their hand and asked to see this publication. But for awareness purposes and pushing content out, it may be a little negative.

In keeping with the quality over quantity brief, the right-hand sidebar, which often contains smaller, cheaper adverts, will all but disappear when the redesigned News Feed is released. Not only will this affect businesses with less to spend on Facebook advertising who are more reliant on smaller ads, it could also create a sizeable dent in Facebook’s ads revenue, which is partially made up of the sales of right sidebar ads.


Now that cover photos are displayed on the News Feed alongside relevant stories, companies will have to be even more certain that they are making the right impression with the image they choose. According to Facebook Studio’s announcement post:

For both organic and paid Page Like stories, the photo that we’ll now display is the Page’s cover photo. This change is designed to provide more context about the Page. All the more reason to make sure your cover photo is eye-catching and visually representative of your Page.

So, the new News Feed focuses on visual content, encourages users to actively seek out advertising and could pave the way for video advertising on Facebook. It is also likely that such image- and video-based advertising will be quite expensive, pricing some smaller marketers out of using the News Feed to advertise their brands. Whether or not Facebook will introduce a new cheaper alternative is yet to be seen.

"How we're all sharing is changing and the news feed needs to evolve with those changes”, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the press conference. “This is the evolving face of news feed."

Users can join the waiting list for the new News Feed here.

What do you think of the new News Feed? How do you think it will affect the work of Facebook marketers?

Contact us on Twitter or leave your comments below.Will Sigsworth

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