October 5, 2015: Facebook has been busy becoming a source of news and content for the past year or so. Between “Trending Tags” and “Instant Articles,” the network has been dying to become the leading news source for internet users. So allowing users, brands and influencers to blog in-house seems like a natural next step.
Just in time for the Halloween season (which now represents about $7 billion in consumer spending), Facebook has resurrected its Notes program. Officially announced on September 25th, the new Notes — a Frankenstein-esque combination of LinkedIn Publisher and popular blogging/forum platform Medium — has rolled out to all Facebook users and can be found on your left home screen side bar (or at http://www.facebook.com/notes).
Before & After : From the Facebook Newsroom
As we’ve mentioned before, the aesthetics of the new Notes is eerily similar to those of popular blogging/forum platform Medium: Facebook has added more options for text formats, more space to house big, beautiful header images, plus a generally cleaner layout. It’s pretty simple to play around with formatting, and Facebook lets you pull images from the library of photos you’ve already uploaded to the network. You can also choose who to serve your content to (I was given options to target my friends along with some of the networks (school, city, job) that I’d joined.
While Notes — unlike Tumblr or LinkedIn — doesn’t offer any fields in which you can type keywords, hashtags do work within your blog. If you choose to publicly publish, this is probably how most users will find this content.
A thrilling Facebook Notes post from the author.
Given Facebook’s apparently depthless desire to become the one-stop-shop for all internet needs, a blogging platform taking advantage of Facebook’s social graph is sure to rattle some bones at the other social networks. While Notes’ potential reach is impressive and the platform — like many others — is free, many content creators remain wary of Facebook’s intentions.
So far, it doesn’t appear that a lot of people are using Notes, so it’s too early to say whether Notes will become what Facebook wants it to be: a place for original, “premium” news-oriented content, or whether it will devolve into yet another spammy, scammy, Freebooting Wild West environment that Facebook can’t really control.
I’m sure Facebook will begin to put incentives behind using Notes, such as paid reach and targeted audiences. The real test will come if and when users actually switch over to Notes to house blog-style long-format content.
The new Facebook Notes may well become yet another “optional but not essential” feature on Facebook, or it might cause Facebook to revert to what it was a couple of years back: a place for personal diary entries. (Which means — if history is any guide — that Notes will likely become yet another tool for the classic Oversharer to use to bombard us.)
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