As the biggest social network in the world, Facebook has to make sure that they keep their users engaged on the site and not annoy them with too much marketing and advertising. But as a company that wants to make money and please their investors, they also have to come up with a model that’s friendly to businesses as well. To that end, Facebook yesterday showed the world what their new homepage is going to look like, and the redesign has lots of businesses eager to see how well it works. So far, investors at least seem positive about the redesign, with shares rising by 4.1 percent after the unveiling. What’s changed?
More specialization
Users overwhelmed by the glut of constant information thrown at them will now be able to view personalized streams on subjects that they choose. Not only can you decide that you only want to see things related to, say, TV shows and the 49ers, you can set your stream up so that it focuses on posts from close friends. However, that doesn’t mean that you won’t see posts from companies and products you “Like.” Under the new design, you’ll be able to switch back and forth between feeds.
Embiggening
Not only can photos now be bigger, so can links. That’s good news for businesses in a variety of ways. First off, advertisers like getting more real estate, so the bigger pictures and links are more likely to draw people’s attention. Beyond that, though, the new bigger sizes will help to make Facebook more mobile-friendly. That will increase the overall audience that can see the ads.
A “personalized newspaper”
That’s what Zuckerberg has said that he wants Facebook to evolve into, with people having immediate access to the kinds of updates and information that are most likely to be interesting to them. The home page, like the front page of a newspaper, will feature content deemed to be “compelling” so that people will be encouraged to “dig in” and keep looking for more. Advertisers have already said that they like the idea of content being divided into different streams, adding that they hope this will lead to people exploring the news stream more and sticking around for longer – which means that they’ll have more time to take in ads. It also never hurts to make advertising more visual, either, and marketers have long found that pictures can help to attract people more readily than words. What do you think of the new design? Leave a comment with your thoughts below!
