New Facebook news feed: Facebook bets on the visual!

On Thursday March 7, 2013, Facebook made an important announcement:  a new news feed  was created. Here are the changes that will affect you.

The purpose of this change: Facebook wanted to emphasize content important to the user, namely photos. Here's a graph presented at Facebook's press conference showing the increase in users' use of photos for posting since November 2011:

So Facebook decided to create a new design for the News Feed:

Facebook has thus developed three axes:

• Richer stories;
• A choice of streams;
• The consistency of the platform.

RICHER STORIES

The multinational decided that it was time to put the emphasis on the visual published by users for users. So Facebook decided to make the photos bigger in the News Feed;  not just user photos, but also photos of links, places and pages. 

Here are some visual changes that will be made by the social network  :

The links will have more prominence: a larger image, a more prominent title and a longer summary of the article. Site logos will also be added to give them prominence.

When several of your friends become friends with the same person, Facebook will show more information about that person:

It will be the same for Facebook pages:

If you are at a location and you  check in , the locations will get the space they deserve with more information about them:

There are also a lot of user shares from other sites like Pinterest. Now, what you see on Facebook will have a visual more similar to that of the site from which we share. For instance :

When multiple people share the same link, Facebook will recognize this as good news and display the link larger:

For events, there will be a new visual that will summarize the activities important to you:

The pages you visit often will give more information:

For celebrity type pages, Facebook can provide you with articles that are shared on the network about this artist:

THE CHOICE OF FLOW

Facebook also wanted to offer new choices to users, so  more news feed choices.

Here are the choices that Facebook will offer, among other things, as news feed choices:

As you see, there are also news feeds depending on the type of content, such as music, where you can see updates from pages that are of the music type.

Streams will be categorized by how you use them. So if you frequently use a certain news feed, Facebook will position it for you at the top.

THE CONSISTENCY OF THE PLATFORMS

The experience will be similar whether you're on a computer, iPad, or iPhone.

As you can see, the normal experience will look much more like the current experience on iPad, with friends present in the right sidebar.

FOR BRANDS, WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

Pictures, pictures… and pictures! You will have to put a lot of importance on the visuals of what you share. Your cover photo, which will be even more important, should be chosen with discernment.

For news sites, Open Graph tags will become even more important as the size of the thumbnail accompanying the link increases.  

Thomas.