August 18, 2015: I have fond memories of melodramatic Facebook Notes from my high school days when people used them to play survey games or passive-aggressively write about whatever drama was going on. Back when Facebook status updates had character limits and Xanga/Livejournal weren’t cool, Notes was where those “deep” friends could pseudo-blog about their lives.
Once Facebook got rid of the character limit in 2009 (max is now 60K characters), Notes quietly disappeared into the backend of Facebook… and no one really seemed to miss it.
Since then, blogging and content marketing have regained and largely overtaken the popularity Notes once enjoyed. Every “influencer” these days has some sort of blog and many, if not most, people receive their news from the Internet. In 2009, the mobile world was not as developed as it is now. Networks such as Tumblr, LinkedIn and Medium — which all combine the elements of long-form blogging with short-form social media-style communities — lead the pack for trending news and thought leadership.
It’s no secret that Facebook doesn’t really like people leaving its pages to use other networks. When Facebook saw Instagram’s explosion in popularity, it bought the service. When YouTube’s “influencer” marketing campaigns were making a ton of money, Facebook revamped its video marketing system… and cheated a little to make it look better. So naturally, the next step is for Facebook to knock out its blogging competition by encouraging people to blog through Notes.
he new Notes layout that is being tested looks strikingly like Medium, with a cleaner layout and room for a big header image. The layout provides for attribution via a byline field, and a timestamp, both earmarks of WordPress-style blogging. Right now, the new Notes layout doesn’t appear to support slots for ads, but because Facebook’s future depends on ad-serving, I have no doubt they’ll be included in the final product.
The big question is whether content creators actually move to the new Notes. Today content creators have no shortage of options for long-form content hosting, from WordPress (which lets creators run their own advertising) to Medium and LinkedIn (which do not). If, however, it turned out that publishing content to Notes resulted in better reach and engagement than publishing to these other platforms (perhaps through aggressively pushing Notes content through Facebook’s feeds), Faceook might be on to something.
Facebook, of course, publishes no original content of its own (aside from its help files). Like all aggregating/distributing services, it must rely on the trust and willingness of content creators to keep things fresh on its service, in order to attract the eyeballs necessary to attract advertisers. And Facebook has some heavy lifting ahead of it in respect to maintaining trust with the creative community. While Facebook boasts the largest reach of any social network, it’s gotten a bad rap recently for “Freebooting.” As a creative, I can’t say that I trust Facebook with my content. Corporate monetization imperatives and creativity often find themselves at odds, and Facebook’s recent apparent nonchalance and support of Internet thievery don’t sit well with those relying on their creativity to put food on the table.
There are some things I love about Facebook as a marketer (its Pages are great for Google placement and its paid ads are very successful for targeting the right audiences) and as a user (I’m an avid Messenger user), but I’ve found other networks that I love as much that are more useful for me to reach my target audiences.
I wish Facebook success with its most recent gambit to attract long-form original content to its service. If Facebook can prove to content creators that Notes provides a noticeably better publishing experience than they can get via the tools out there today, and a number of top-tier content producers come over to Notes, it would certainly make Facebook a more interesting place to spend time on.
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