The year is 2006. Life was different then – the world of social media was still coming out of its infancy stages, with companies simply trying to figure out what social media was and not understanding the power behind these giant social networks. Eight months into the year, Facebook announced the launch of “Facebook Notes” and a handful of people noticed.
In their infancy, Facebook notes were a way to communicate useless information about individuals to their friends… at least, that’s how it was widely used. Anyone on Facebook in those days remembers the nauseating number of “Here’s a list of my favorite 100 (insert literally anything here)” posts. This went on for a few years, and then around 2010/2011 Facebook notes seemed to all but disappear off the face of the earth, providing zero real value to Facebook or its user base.
Fast-forward to 2015. Facebook is competing ferociously with Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media powerhouses to maintain and, ideally, increase market share. LinkedIn’s “Influencers” program has been out for three years now (to the month, in fact) – this program was designed to allow select thought leaders to publish content on the heavily-business oriented social platform, and the program took off with great success. Now, hundreds of thousands of LinkedIn users flock to the site daily to create their own articles using LinkedIn’s publishing platform.
In the spirit of not letting another social platform gain the upper hand in the market, Facebook is bringing notes back, in a big way. With a more modern and user-friendly interface, users can now post near identical content to Facebook using the Notes publishing tool, and it’s only starting to catch on now, and if LinkedIn’s success is any indication (Google “linkedin publishing results” if you’re having trouble believing me), this could be a huge update for Facebook, and could see a heightened influx of content marketing on the social giant.
In fact, this is one of those special moments in the evolution of social media where an easily exploitable tool has yet to be truly exploited. While many believe this will function identically to LinkedIn, and that the market will become over-saturated quickly, the fact that there are currently very few organizations utilizing the program opens the door for anyone to walk in.
Our advice? Create some good, quality content, and fire away. Hate writing? Let fellow blog contributor, Tony Zayas, walk you through it. No clue what content marketing is? We’ve got you covered there too.