With a recent announcement made by Facebook that they would be revamping the long-forgotten ‘Notes’ feature of the social networking site, the social giant seems to be getting more and more aggressive in its bid to become the next WordPress… and LinkedIn, and YouTube, and….eh, well, World Domination, you all get the idea.
I can’t remember ever using Facebook notes, even in my earlier days of Facebook (back when the Poke button was still around and all the rage). But as a writer, who often feels like a regular Facebook post can be a little restrictive in terms of characters, the idea of posting longform content directly onto the social site kind of intrigues me. Those of you familiar with the site Medium will recognise the newly-revamped design that Facebook appears to be testing (as of the time of writing, I cannot see the new Notes design in my personal account), with its large header image and wide format text blocks. Admittedly, some of the best content I’ve ever read has been via Medium – But will a trendy new design be enough to get people to leave their trusty WordPress blog and start tapping away, in between sharing GIFs, news articles, and accidentally liking people’s photos from 3 years ago?
Let’s face it – it’s where a lot of us spend a lot of our time already
Many of us spend too much plenty of time on Facebook already. So will having the option to pour your heart out whenever inspiration strikes, without having to open a new tab and fire up WordPress or Tumblr, encourage people enough people to embrace the new-look feature? If it meant that more of your friends were going to read what you wrote, then you might, and indeed, many bloggers of late have been abandoning their blogs in favour of posting on social networking sites instead.
What will this mean for brands – if anything?
Well, actually quite a lot, potentially. This is just another update in a long string of recent changes that Facebook has made in its apparent bid to try and get people and brands to post content directly on the service, rather than just linking to external sites. Instant Articles is a perfect example of how it’s started to encourage content publishers to publish directly on the site, and it’s recently become even more clear that the site appears to be making a bid to become the next YouTube, by giving preference and higher visibility to videos hosted directly on Facebook’s platform.
So, will brands that “blog” a lot using Facebook be more likely to have their content and ads shown to a wider audience, in a similar way that brands who blog on their website a lot tend to show up higher in search engine results pages? Only time will tell, but we’re looking forward to experimenting more with this new feature in the coming months and seeing what kind of reach we can get for our clients.
What do you think the future holds for Facebook notes? Will it be something that might prove useful for brands trying to gain wider reach using social networks?