Last week Facebook announced a huge change to the news feed that you see every day in Facebook. Statistics show that over 50% of the content on the newsfeed that is shared is visual content, so predominantly images and video.
The reason for these changes to quote Mark Zuckerberg is to provide each user with “the best personalised newspaper in the World” and in order to achieve that they have changed the user experience in three parts.
- Visually more appealing posts
- A choice of different feeds
- Consistency on access device, phone, pad or laptop shouldn’t change your experience.
Taking these a point at a time, the first thing that you will notice is that when you upload an image to Facebook it will be given far more prominence than it was previously, and it is really important to upload your images (rather than just linking to them) so that you get a larger more engaging image. They say that a picture paints a thousand words, well on Facebook this seems to be true, its more about pictures (and videos that are also gaining visual prominence) than it is about words. Another change will be that when someone likes your page, your cover image will appear instead of just your profile image (which typically would hold your logo) – Is your cover image striking?? if not best get to work on it!
As a user you can also hop between news feeds of your choice so you can switch between family news and then interest items you are following to make it easier for you to keep up with everything that is important to you.
Finally, you should get the same experience on Facebook regardless of access device so that features and functions should have a familiarity and consistency about them, that can only be a good thing!
As a marketer using Facebook how can you make sure you take advantage of these new changes, one thing is for sure as well as making sure you have really rich stories, you’re going to be needing really rich images to go with them to grab the attention of your audience. For some businesses this is going to be more challenging, but time to get creative, how can you put your business stories into images?
You can have a look at the announcement here and if you need help with inspiration, give us a call…