THE RISE OF VISUAL STORYTELLING 11 on your Facebook home page, and it offered a personalized collection of information curated by your activities, groups you belonged to, photos your friends were tagged in, and more. The Mini-Feed offered updates on 6 what had been changed to a user’s Facebook profile. Rather quickly users began to see the value in reading their friends’ status updates and seeing photos as part of a stream of news. The experience ultimately paved the way for today’s Facebook News Feed layout. The continued shift toward a more visual Facebook user experience continued from 2007 to 2012. From tabs, to apps, groups, and pages, users began to “like” the pages created by companies and public figures as a way to showcase their interest in them. In 2007, Facebook was fil- tering an average of 30,000 News Feed story updates into a customized 7 stream of 60 stories for each user every day. As a result, securing a text placement in the News Feed was equated to getting into the first page of Google’s search results.8 However, brands couldn’t secure this premium placement without paying, developing an app, or inserting an ad next to 9 News Feed items. In 2008, apps boomed in popularity, and status updates emerged as a tool that companies could use to share valuable content and images within their pages or groups. But this content was mostly distributed either through an inbox message or an update notification 10 to view the post. Users could then decide if they cared to learn more and visit the page, app, or group, requiring the content to work that much harder. In 2011, the launch of Facebook Timeline completely shook up the Facebook user experience—in a good way. Promising you an opportu- nity to “tell your life story with a new kind of profile,” images, videos, and interactive content rose in prominence over Facebook’s previous text-heavy environment. Users now had the opportunity to craft a highly interactive, sharable, digital, scrapbooklike layout with a cover photo, they could use large images, and they could organize important historical information about themselves. Featuring a similar experience for brands, Timeline for brands allowed brand pages to promote visual content in a completely new way, with the results to prove it. In 2012, just one month