What the Newsfeed Change Means For Facebook Marketing

Facebook has announced a major redesign of the news feed. Users will soon login to find a whole new experience with multiple news feeds, less clutter, and more and larger pictures. What does all of this mean for Facebook marketing? The short version is that if you are doing Facebook marketing right, the new feed should be good for you.If you haven’t updated your strategy for while, now is a good time to do that. If your page posts a lot of pictures and you support key posts with in-stream sponsored stories you are ready for the new feed and can look forward to being able to show Facebook users larger and more effective ads and pictures. If you still mostly post text updates and links, and rely on traditional sidebar ads, you need a new strategy.

Facebook’s big challenge is to make it easier for users to see only what they want while still being shown what Facebook is paid to show them. One of the things Facebook is doing in this update is creating different types of feeds for people to use when they want to focus on either photos, friends, or pages. Facebook has tried training its users to use multiple feeds before, but has never been very successful at it. The jury is still out on whether they will succeed this time. Regardless of their success in getting users to use multiple feeds, it is imperative that marketers learn to use more and larger pictures, and in-feed sponsored stories. That is where the action is going to be.

One thing page owners often forget is that most of the people who like their page rarely or never visit it. Almost all of their interactions with the page is through stories in their newsfeed. This has meant that not having a good cover photo has been something you can get away with without too much negative effect. That is no longer the case as a smaller version of it will be displayed in the new feeds as part of the posts and ads from your page.

To master the new newsfeed do what you should already be doing: Post visually pleasing posts with focus on images, and ditch the classic ads for sponsored stories. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or if there is anyway we can help you get more out of your Facebook marketing efforts!