DISQUS

Julie · 8 months ago

Adam, I agree with you that the redesign has allowed businesses (in the form of Fan Pages) to become a much more integrated part of the site. I believe that Facebook had it right when it shifted to lifestreaming as a whole in the previous redesign, rather than the new focus on status updates. To that end, I think Facebook could have achieved the integration of Pages (and businesses) without compromising the way that users receive information. (I guess what I'm trying to say is that, yes, this may be one positive outcome of the redesign, but it could have been done without implementing the changes that users are so upset about.)

Faizal Rahman · 8 months ago

do you have idea how to auto post from twitter to pages status

thatkidrich · 8 months ago

get selective twitter app for fb. You can post your tweets by adding #fb at the end.

Amy Strecker · 8 months ago

I totally get how this change is helpful for business, however as a personal user I'm still finding it incredibly painful. I've actually de-fanned several brands because of their constant content streams. Particularly brands I also follow on Twitter (like, Mashable -- sorry!). :)

In your reality check paragraph, I also wonder how sxsw affects this rise in traffic? It's generally one of the hottest times of the year for everything tech, no?

Vikram · 8 months ago

Are you sure the increase in traffic is NOT because the number of mashable post feeds have increased- I see more mashable updates on my facebook than a few weeks back, and obviously there are many i click into...

Moreover, given that most people at worst hate, and usually are confused with the new layout, and considering mashable has been writing a lot about this new fb layout, wouldn't that be an influence in itself?

Adam Ostrow · 8 months ago

well, that's sort of the point ... these updates didn't used to show up on the homepage, now they do, which = more traffic for brands

Fiona · 8 months ago

I'm sad. I use twitter differently than I use Facebook. I keep Facebook more personal and have loved easier communication with extended family and reconnecting to old friends on a daily basis. I use twitter more for information and promoting my blog. I don't want another twitter... I want my Facebook. I love them both the same amount ... differently.

Christina Dyrness Williams · 8 months ago

Or look at it this way: How to take down Twitter in three easy steps. http://bit.ly/23Wfh

KissHeartofFL · 8 months ago

I had to scroll down to the bottom of my news feed and click HIDDEN FRIENDS to add everything I'm a fan of back into my news feed. Do you think most people will know how to do this? Otherwise businesses won't get their status updates loading on their fans' pages. Is there something businesses can do to avoid this? Appreciate your feedback!

ls · 8 months ago

I HAVE THIS SAME PROBLEM! My page was automatically added to the 'Hidden Friends' list at the bottom of the news feed page. Nobody receiving my updates because of this. Also wondering why other pages I am a fan of were not automatically thrown in here like my page was? Is it because they have a huge fan base and are mainstream? Facebook needs to change this and automatically add every page you are a fan of into your stream - AND THEN give you the option to hide... not the other way around!! Would be great to see an article about this.

Bibliophile · 8 months ago

As a page admin, I share your frustration (see my comment further down). If you haven't already, definitely make sure you report this bug to facebook so that they make this priority. There's a discussion thread and links to the bug report here: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=103814695...

Jeff · 8 months ago

I can really see why Facebook changes every now and then - to stay relevant, and be more useful to brands as they are on a mission to monetize their data. While I don't like the new home page from a user perspective, I think in the long run, we'll learn to live with it. As a company, however, I am excited to see that I can use Facebook to advertise my fan page and see some actual results!

nic · 8 months ago

The announcement that someone has become a fan of a Page no longer shows up on the news feed, though. And even on the profile page, the entry is played down significantly. In the old Facebook, seeing one of my contacts becoming a fan allowed me to realize that the page for the brand has a Facebook presence, and compelled me to consider becoming a fan myself. The new Facebook does not provide enough opportunities to even notice the Pages.

kittenheel · 8 months ago

Exactly. So you get more traffic to your facebook page from pre-existing users. But the fact that "Jane doe joined mashable" no longer appears in the news feed really hinders the ability for the brand to be spread outside its present-day fans.

blackysky · 8 months ago

Who is more important the people or the businesses... I mean the people made facebook popular... don’t loose your mind because of money…I think they should change pages only and then do a one week try out with this format and a survey at the top like or hate for profile… right now facebook change all the time. It is hard to follow sometimes….

Leandro · 8 months ago

It's all well and good if brands like the new Facebook design, but I can't think of a single person off the top of my head that hasn't commented on how much less time they are spending on FB now. The filters are confusing, the news feed feels like a bunch of spam. I also admin. a relatively high-profile FB page, and they've gutted our specialized applets designed for the previous iteration, and the editing controls are clunky (if functional at all).

blackysky · 8 months ago

right now the home page look so noisy .. can you imagine being a fan of 5 brands... so noisy now... since that i spent less time and I'm not the only one.... their quest for money can hurt them... or maybe I'm a exception

SteveH · 8 months ago

Not sure if everyone knows this, but you can reorder the 'groups' of your friends at the top left of the new home page, and you can even drag 'news feed' down so that it is not the 'default' view when you hit the home page.

What this means is that you can create a 'no brands, please' group of just friends/family/colleagues/whatever, and drag that to the top and when you hit your home page that will be displayed - not the 'noisy' brand-ridden news feed.

I absolutely love the new design...more like Friendfeed, which is all good. (I just wish they'd up their feed importing options to be more flexible and granular like Friendfeed!)

Adam Ostrow · 8 months ago

yea, that is totally the counter-argument to the idea that FB is being taken over by brands. the grouping options are awesome if you use them, but I think a lot of users aren't aware of how to take advantage of them.

RonRobinson · 8 months ago

I like the new design. A hint of Twitter mixed with the best of facebook.

Kelly Reeves · 8 months ago

Yes, but promoting brands is not what Facebook was originally about. They've sold out and did so in such an annoying way by completely ignoring their users, millions of whom do not care or want advertisements thrown in their face when they're trying to reconnect with an old friend or loved one. Go to LinkedIN if you want to do business and keep Facebook personal.

Bill Leonard · 8 months ago

"Users aside though"

Really? The minute Facebook actually takes that approach, it is in a downward spiral. Screw brands, its a social network for people first.

Joyful Alternative · 8 months ago

That sounds like the "sellers aside though" that's sent eBay into its downward spiral!

Allison · 8 months ago

I haven't seen anything but status updates on my not-so-live feed. I don't even know how to get to my favorite brands' pages anymore

Ryan Lewis · 8 months ago

They could have accomplished the same business integration by just adding updates into feeds. I think facebook overthought this redesign a little and made a huge mistake. I can already notice my usership waning

Bibliophile · 8 months ago

I agree there is *potential* here for facebook to be good for brands, but there are some pitfalls in the current setup. First, as Jenny points out in these comments, Facebook totally screwed the pooch for most brands when they did the upgrade: for some unbelievably dumb reason (perhaps out of error) they set most brands to be HIDDEN from user's news feeds. It took me several days to figure out why I couldn't see posts from my favorite brands (including one I administer), and I had to search the discussion boards to finally find someone who discovered that Facebook had hidden these by default. So basically, every *existing* fan I had before the upgrade will probably never realize that they should be seeing posts from my brand. (New fans curiously get the posts *shown* by default.) Since I'm hidden from their feed, there is no way to tell these fans to unhide my brand (since "updates" are now also tucked away on the Inbox page where nobody will ever see them). Upshot: Facebook effectively *removed* the ability of most pages to communicate with their previous fans. (On your $5-10/fan investment, how much money did FB just cost me??)

Second, as many people have pointed out here, there is a serious peril for brands here of over-spamming people's feeds. With the new system, you don't exactly get access to fans "for life" as you say in the post: you get them until they hide you. In fact, I have to confess that Mashable was the first brand I decided to hide on the new facebook (sorry) because you guys post WAY too much to my feed. Now, I should say that part of the reason I hid Mashable is that I already read your RSS feed every day, so I had no need to see your posts twice. But this is a warning to brands: that little "x" button is very easy to click if users feel like they're seeing way too much of you in proportion to updates from their "real" friends. And unless a user really cares, are they ever going to bother to "unhide" you?

What facebook really needs here is a smarter system of filters so that I can control how many brand updates I see (or in what view), rather than simply turning them on or off. I could go on all day about the improvements facebook needs to make in order to make these new system serviceable, but I'll leave it at my verdict: this is probably a good step in the right direction for brands and for users, but only if FB (and the brands that use it) continues to tread very cautiously and wisely.

Adam Ostrow · 8 months ago

Which updates are hidden? Whatever we put under "write something" seems to go right to Fans' home feed

Bibliophile · 8 months ago

All updates are hidden: every status update, link, photo, etc. posted through the page's "write something" publisher. It is unclear how many brands this is affecting--since Facebook has so far not commented on the issue at all, despite the pleas in its official forums. You'll be happy to hear that Mashable was the ONLY brand that was not automatically hidden from my personal feed when they did the upgrade. It seems the New York Times also managed to get special treatment (according to some people's reports -- I wasn't a fan of their page prior to the upgrade). But all 16 of my other "fan" pages were automatically hidden, and I had to unhide them manually. This has turned out to be the case for every other existing fan that I've been able to contact.

The issue has been reported by lots of page admins in the official Facebook Pages discussion: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=103814695...

slicingupeyeballs · 8 months ago

I think the new design is very helpful for pages -- except for growing the fan base.

If someone becomes a fan of a page, it no longer shows up in the newsfeed... saying, "So and so is a fan of whatever." And that's how things used to spread virally and exponentially.

Now that doesn't happen.

Adam Ostrow · 8 months ago

I'm seeing lots of these in "highlights" though, once more than one person (or sometimes just 1) has become a fan of something

Stephanie DeLuca · 8 months ago

Nice post. I think that it’s great that businesses can use Facebook to their advantage but I personally don’t like the new design. I wonder if users will get used to it like the last time they changed their page.

Sang Park · 8 months ago

Personally I don't mind the new 'layout' of the site as much. But I do miss the old contents. I understand that they are going for Tweeter feel... (imagine what they would've done if they acquired tweeter..) but the old newsfeed was really useful when trying to keep in touch with my friends.... it's really disorienting to see two different feed on my mac and on my iPhone app (which still shows old news feed). In the end, what I love to get back is the old customization option. Yes, with new feed, you could turn off news from a brand.. but I would rather have option to just tune it down rather than turning it off completely. I like the whole group specific feed, but it would be nice to have control over the frequency of items. instead of choosing all or nothing.

btw, this page runs horribly on iPhone.. my mobile safari crashed several times while I was trying to leave this comment.. now i'm back on my mac.

Sang Park · 8 months ago

hmm also the application feed option seems to only show applications that are on the front page of the newsfeed... so i can't get any app specific newsfeed if it's not on the front page?
-.-.-;;;;;

Sean · 8 months ago

Anything that spams my home page on fb now gets blocked with prejudice, and some of my friends are blocked too. Just how is this good for a long term business? Those apps will never see me again.

Duuuuuude · 8 months ago

The ability of brands and pages to publish to the newsfeed could've been accomplished without some of the oversimplification (or Twitterizing) of the news feed features. These things aren't mutually exclusive. The fact that I have no ability to eliminate news feeds from non-branded applications that are basically spam (like quizzes, polls, etc.) is incredibly annoying. I either have the option to turn one user on or off, not their individual content types. I support receiving content from entities that I choose to hear from -- the problem is that Facebook has eliminated alot of freedom intentionally and increased the annoying factor by default. This is akin to Friendster not addressing user growth and Myspace not addressing spam. Right now they're being stubborn, but if they don't adjust, it's a game-changer, because people are going to leave.

Marito · 8 months ago

It's not that much as the author says. It's a good idea through a business perspective but they should have set up filters so as not to be flooded with News from things we actually don't care. And also, the loss of knowing our friends became fan from other pages make them lose the virality.
As people say, It's easy to click the X button and so far I have been hiding all News from Pages. Facebook is for friends, I don't think people want to hear about business and other stuff. I hope they realize this and make a couple of filters so as we can at least manage how much we want from this pages in our feed.

Mike · 8 months ago

Obviously a great idea in terms of bringing in revenue. Business will definitely love this, and they are the ones that pay for different services on Facebook, not the more than 60 million users.

Still, I can't stand the change. I go on Facebook now expecting it to look and function like Twitter and it's just so cluttered. When I want to promote something on either of these sites I just create a listing on http://ilist.com and iList does it for me. It's just a frustrating mess on the Facebook homepage, but the uprising won't do much to slow down the so-so decision making of this social media giant.

Facebook User · 8 months ago

I like the new facebook!

Wisewinston · 8 months ago

I follow Mashable (and some of its writers) on Twitter and therefore don't follow Mashable on Facebook. What would be the point of doing both? I'd assume that people who use both sites will probably use Facebook to stay in touch with peripheral friends and use Twitter to follow brands/news sites. There are lots of people on FB but not Twitter and so they will continue to get their brand info from Facebook, I guess. That's just my opinion.

As for Facebook changes. C'mon people. Give it another few weeks and you won't even remember what it was like before. I've stopped using FB as much, but that's not because of the re-design. It's because my friends' updates are usually lame and boring. I prefer following experts in their field on Twitter. Kinda ironic.

Hooman Radfar · 8 months ago

Do you think that folks will start to drive people to pages OUTSIDE facebook that are enabled with FB Connect? I think the idea of streams is novel, but is it really the best thing for a brand to have their creative capacity limited by the functionality of a fan page. Don't have the answer, but am curious...

Adam Ostrow · 8 months ago

Facebook Pages have a much lower barrier to entry than building out your own app with FB Connect. Hence, I think we'll see a lot more Pages than Connect apps, though, certainly a combo of them would create quite the loop in terms of generating interaction on FB.

Lisa · 8 months ago

I will block any page that I become a fan of that spams my newsfeed. I will make a point of NOT clicking on any fan spam - no matter how enticing...
Social media is about choice, and your right to exercise it...

marshal sandler · 8 months ago

I really think Facebook is a playground not a medium to advertise, Twitter will now be creating custom streams-this will be a killer approach to marketing remember also the people who have invested in Twitter understand Internet marketing Facebook is sort an off shoot of old media filled with distracting applications that are cute bu have not monetised Face book

marshal sandler · 8 months ago

Twitter with it's addition of sponsored streams will leave a lot of people in the dust Faceook seems to take direction from old media types-

mrtobo · 8 months ago

you've noted one facet of the benefit provided by the new facebook.

i think, however, there's a lot more benefit than you are noting.

the internet is great for spreading ideas and now, with the new facebook, new ideas can spread about faster than they ever could. sure, there's money in it, but i'm grateful for that because if there wasn't, we wouldn't be able to spread ideas so fast.

i think it's great.

jamesm1234 · 8 months ago

Facebook is a great feature. Its branding is very simple yet iconic, as you can tell what something is purely by associating a colour scheme, layout or type font.
A little SEO tip is to set up facebook accounts for all staff, and get them to join other groups and start placing back links on other groups on facebook, get talking to people and people will start clicking the links to leave blogs, etc on your page, or site. It does work.

King Khan · 8 months ago

Its not a site for brands, its for people who want to connect.

CraigS · 8 months ago

Shame they had to change it.. at least give people the option you know..?

kate · 8 months ago

Ditto, Julie. I don't care about the streaming feed, I care about a preponderonce of "little" things that changed for users that aren't so good. I go to my FB less now and am less active in general on it which means I'm not clicking through to anyone's pages and I'm not inviting any new friends. I enlisted about a fourth of my friends from the land of "what's Facebook?" before the redo, but since I'm contemplating other venues for this type of socializing, it'd be a waste of time to do that now. I DO like how the pages are done, but I just don't want to spend as much time on FB anymore.

willswords · 8 months ago

Fortunately there are numerous Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox that let you hack out all the new garbage that comes through now on the homepage. For example: Facebook Purity http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/44459

Viralwordpress · 8 months ago

I love the New Facbook Look!

Both from a marketing perspective and as an individual.
It's cleaner. The old Facebook looked choppy, almost like a cheap script you could buy
off of hotscripts.

I hope they tweek the new look even more.
There are some cool new feature now that they didn't have before.
I think any users who complain, are just doing so out of anger that they now have to get used to something new, just when they figured out how to use the old Facebook.

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James Carson · 8 months ago

Not sure about gaining extra traffic to pages because of the redesign. At SEGA our page had a record month during February, then as the pages were redesigned we saw drop offs by as much as 50%. The numbers clearly weren't good for us. However, we are getting used to the new features, and think in the long term we will see a big improvement.

susan.diana.harris · 8 months ago

Does Facebook only allow Twitter feeds for personal accounts? How can businesses' Twitter posts feed into their business FB profile?

Tubtoes · 7 months ago

I kinda like this addition

Photo Editing Expert · 2 months ago

I love the new look.

Eric Alvarado · 8 months ago

Personally, I think the recent additions/changes to Facebook's homepage. I just hope that the quest for money doesn't damage the product. So far, pretty good.