New Facebook Leaves Brands Guessing

Facebook has announced an all-new News Feed showcasing a more visually rich interface, mimicking the aesthetic of Timeline in some ways and giving users options that amount to Reddit-like filters for different categories of content. For now, the revamp doesn’t seem to offer anything that brands and Facebook advertisers can immediately take advantage of, with early feedback that the changes in-fact seem to help users filter out ads.

The unveiling took place at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters, where Facebook presented News Feed as its new and improved ‘third pillar’ of social networking, the other two being Timeline and Graph Search. It also positioned the revamp as enabling three major new functions for users: an influx of media rich content, a way to create feeds based on interests and, in what it seemed to stress most, a “mobile-inspired” user interface. Underlining the first two benefits, Facebook highlighted how the overhaul is more visual, displaying larger thumbnail and logo images and highlighting video content.

Mark Zuckerberg said News Feed could become “the best personalized newspaper,” where users can now categorize content under headers such as music, photos, games and close friends. Facebook Software Engineer Chris Struhar described the change by saying, “Facebook is getting out of the way as much as possible.”

The reaction so far has been that the News Feed change is meant to win over users but with unclear benefits to brand pages and even advertisers on the site. In fact the current feeling is that it’s going to help people filter out more ads, a growing complaint from users. It’s a change from post-IPO Facebook, which has been primarily focused on changes and new products, such as Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories, designed so advertisers can reach more of its audience.

As far as brand pages go, Mashable quickly outlined four ways publishers and brands can begin their journey into the new News Feed, most of it revolving around improving rich media content.

Facebook’s mobile users won’t see much change yet. In fact, the new News Feed is borrowing from features that were already part of Facebook’s mobile interface such as the scrollbar. Facebook put out a video highlighting what the changes mean.