Facebook Poised to Unveil Sweeping Design Changes

Facebook is planning on March 11 to unveil a sweeping redesign of both its homepage and its branded partner pages--changes that may require publishers and advertisers to take a more active role in communicating to users via the popular site.In a conference call with reporters on Wednesday (Mar. 4), the company announced it has signed on more than a dozen partners to test a new version of its public branded pages, including President Obama, The New York Times, the National Basketball Association and the band U2. Going forward, these partners’ pages will be designed to better resemble the average person’s Facebook profile rather than serving as static destinations where users can look up basic information. According to Facebook’s director of product Chris Cox, the idea will be for these companies and officials to become more active publishers, frequently broadcast messages in real time like so many Facebook users do.In addition, bloggers and small publishers can now use Facebook as a platform to publish content to an unlimited number of friends/readers. Previously, Facebook users were limited to 5,000 friends. These changes in approach are a recognition of an overall shift in the way people use Facebook, which in the past few years has evolved into a live communciation vehicle where users regularly update their statuses--rather than the Web’s version of a phonebook. “From who you are to what are you doing,” said Cox. The revamped homepage will reflect that reality, as the three-year old News Feed product will now become the site’s centerpiece, showcasing an ever-changing list of text, photo and video messages posted by users, publishers and advertisers. Facebook users will now be able to group all of their various friends in several pre-set categories, such as close friends, co-workers, and family—and also far more easily control how often they receive status updates from whom. “You control who is in your stream,” offered Cox. “That’s something users have been asking for a lot.” In addition, while News Feed will now focus solely on real-time status updates, a secondary feed called Highlights will report on various actions take by a users friends on the site—such as Mike joined the group X.Under the new format brands’ and publishers messages will also be published via The Stream. Thus, theoretically advertisers that in the past have simply maintained fan pages on the site might need to become more active participants/communicators to get noticed on Facebook. However, advertising hardly came up during Wednesday’s call, as the focus was on the site’s much guarded and debated user-experience. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented that Facebook’s new design should help increase user engagement, which should appeal to brands. “The concept of being connected to someone has a lot of value,” he said.

Performance Marketing

Facebook Poised to Unveil Sweeping Design Changes

Mike Shields

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