What You Need to Know About Facebook’s News Feed Redesign

Friday, April 5th, 2013
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This may be a plain quote on a post-it, but it's much more eye-catching than typing plain text.

This may be a plain quote on a post-it, but it’s much more eye-catching than typing plain text.

Facebook recently overhauled its News Feed so that images and shared content are much more prominent. About half of all Facebook posts consist of visual content, so Facebook redesigned the feed to feature photos more vibrantly, and articles with longer excerpts and bigger thumbnails. Check-ins and shared articles are made more prominent by featuring them in a bigger box.

You may recall reading about tips for improving your Facebook posts. Of these tips, now more than ever it’s increasingly important to feature a compelling image. You may have written a brilliant blog post, but if it doesn’t initially catch anyone’s attention, few people may read it. They are too busy skipping over to the pictures of cute kittens and amazing scenery.

Not long ago, people would post quotes from famous figures by simply typing in the text. Now the majority of the quotes you see are in the form of an image with the text superimposed over a picture of the famous person. It’s more impactful and dramatically increases its sharability. Even without a photo of anything, the image quote featured in this article grabs your attention much more readily than if I were to simply type the text.

The bottom line is, if you want to get noticed, make your post more noticeable. Even if your picture is not worth a thousand words, it will still get seen before the plain text will.

Zoe is a web designer by day and a caped super-hero by night. Okay not really, but she really is a web designer at Nexternal with over 14 years of experience coding HTML, CSS, and other magical web things. She also enjoys helping others, which is a bit like channeling her inner hero.      Google+ Profile