While advertising was not mentioned once during Facebook's unveiling of its redesigned News Feed, the focus on rich content and select feeds poses some significant opportunities and challenges for brands and marketers.
According to Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, the redesign is focused on removing the clutter from the News Feed and creating a coherent user experience across all screens and devices.
Andreas Pouros, COO of digital marketing agency Greenlight, says while the update makes the News Feed simpler and easier to use, it also means that adverts on the social network will be more visible and will take up more space.
Pouros says that while the mobile-inspired design is a shrewd move on Facebook's part, a conflict between user experience and increasing ad revenue looms large for the social network.
"The redesign is a welcome development as Facebook was beginning to look a little dated. The screenshots show some big aesthetic changes. Instead of a single feed when a user logs in, the change will see multiple feeds dividing content by several categories, including music and photos. All in all, this will likely encourage users to stay on the site longer," says Pouros.
"Facebook has claimed nothing has changed when it comes to ads, but has conceded they will take up more space as a result of the redesign."
During the most recent Facebook earnings call, Zuckerberg said: "Advertisers want really rich things like big pictures or videos and we haven't provided those things historically."
Zuckerberg also noted that 2012 was the year that Facebook made the transition to being a mobile-first company, with more daily mobile users than desktop users.
The social network also revealed that its mobile ad sales had more than doubled on the previous quarter, to $306 million (or 23% of total ad revenues).
Pouros says: "Facebook has taken the success of advertising in peoples' newsfeeds on mobile and based its News Feed redesign on mirroring that format (or close to it) on all devices - this should boost revenue."
According to Pouros, Facebook's challenge now is to "reinvent advertising" so its users don't feel they are being bombarded by ads. "Facebook is now championing 'high-quality advertising' in an attempt to do that."
The problem of choice
Greenlight's latest "Search and Social Survey" found that 15% of Facebook users would pay to see no ads, while 70% say they never, or rarely click on ads or sponsored listings on Facebook.
Reuters quotes chief executive of AdParlor Hussein Fazal as saying the new design will offer marketers the opportunity to create more compelling ads: "Larger images will result in higher click-through rates, a higher level of engagement and better performance."
Notably, Facebook's redesign also offers additional specialised news feeds - including "Friends Only", "Following", "Photos" and "Music" - making it easier for users to access content from brand pages, but also shut it out.
Facebook has said the additional feeds will not initially feature ads, although these feeds do provide the social network with more potential ad space.
The "Friends Only" feed, for example, only shows updates from friends in chronological order (without the interference of Facebook's algorithms which filter content based on various criteria). The "Following" feed shows all the content from pages and public figures they follow.
While the "Following" feed could help expose more content to more Facebook users, it will depend on whether Facebook users actually use the feed or not.
The traditional News Feed, which combines all content and displays it according to Facebook's algorithms, will remain but there is now more choice for users.
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