You Might Not Love the New Facebook, But Brands Should

Earlier this week, we posed the question “Where has the old Facebook gone?” to address the frustrating experience that many users are having with the latest homepage design. The post attracted tons of feedback, most of which agreed with the sentiment that the new homepage is less personal, less informative, and less attractive to application users and developers.

Users aside though, there is one audience that appears to be benefitting greatly from Facebook’s new design: brands. Not only are Facebook Pages – the network’s competitive play against celebrity Twitter () users – revamped and more social, but their updates are taking up space on member’s homepages, and in turn, as our data shows, driving lots of traffic and engagement for brands.

The Numbers

At Mashable, we’ve been using our page to share our articles, post photos from our journey to SXSW, and engage users in conversation. And the results so far have been rather stunning. Comparing traffic to Mashable ().com referred by Facebook from 3/5-3/11 to 3/12-3/18 (the 7-day period before and after the new homepage rolled out), we’ve seen a 75% increase in visitors. Moreover, our Facebook Page itself is seeing 2-3x more visitors on a daily basis than it did in the previous iteration of Facebook’s homepage.

Reality Check

Now, to be fair, we have been actively promoting our Facebook Page to users on our blog and Twitter, which has helped grow our fan base on Facebook by around 1,800 people for the period we’re reporting on here. But, while we reach far fewer users on Facebook than on Twitter or via RSS, the ratio of users that click-thru to stories appears to be higher. And, in any event the growth in traffic we’ve seen is far outpacing the growth of our Facebook () fan base, leading us to conclude that Pages are, for the moment, a highly effective marketing tool in the new Facebook.

Is It Good For Users?

Much like Twitter, Facebook Pages are opt-in. If a brand becomes too loud on your homepage, you can simply stop being their Fan, or in Facebook’s case, hide their updates. As brands catch onto the benefits of Facebook Pages, we’re likely to see a lot more of them, and likely to see our user homepages get more and more noisy. But, that seems to be what Facebook wants as it attempts to emulate Twitter and the so-called real-time Web.

Is It Good for Facebook?

So far, Facebook has not only survived but prospered after every controversial change, going all the way back to the original News Feed. The homepage changes in and of themselves, though currently unpopular with some, aren’t likely to do much to slow down Facebook’s ascent. Meanwhile, they may have just unlocked the business model that moves them from a successful social network to a highly profitable business.

Sure, you could already buy ads on Facebook to promote your Page. But now, the incentive to do so is far greater, because each Fan you gain can be marketed to for free via the Facebook homepage feed. Even if it costs $5-10 to acquire a Fan (PPC ads seem to run about 50 cents for Pages, assume 5-10 percent conversion), it seems like a small price to pay to have lifetime access to engage that user. We’re already seeing Twitter users take out ads to gain more followers – this trend is likely to accelerate on Facebook too.

Suddenly, Facebook’s homepage re-design makes a lot more sense, not just from a “copy Twitter because it’s so hot!” perspective, but from the “let’s make a ton of money” angle too.