Having recently celebrated its 10th birthday, a new application recently released by Facebook appears to have gotten the social media juggernaut off to a great start in its second decade of existence.
Understanding that sites like Buzzfeed continue to gain in popularity and steal traffic away from the social networking site, the new app—Paper—allows users to choose several newsfeeds through which to browse the world of Facebook. Of course, there’s the traditional newsfeed, but there’s also newsfeeds called Headlines, Planet, Sports and Tech, among 20 total categories. Users can customize which newsfeeds they see, and those are curated by editors hired by Facebook.
Are you a news-savvy browser? Push Headlines to the forefront of your Facebook experience. What about a guy interested in all things tech? Do you just like looking at cute pictures of animals? Whatever your proclivities, just swipe your finger to rearrange the categories as you see fit.
What does all this mean for content marketers? Well, according to Mike Matas—the man who designed the iPhone’s original software whom Mark Zuckerberg hired to join Facebook’s Creative Labs division—the goal of Paper is to “put content first.” Rather than viewing Facebook as a platform primarily through which to stay in touch with friends and let everyone know what you’re having for dinner, Paper transforms it into a central depot for all the content that is pertinent to each specific user.
“Picking up a feed on your phone is nowhere near the experience of picking up your favorite magazine and flipping through it,” Matas explains.
Paper was designed specifically to change that experience. And so far, it looks like Matas and his team succeeded. The app’s reviews are trickling in, and they all appear to bode well for Facebook. Let’s take a look about what some tech bloggers are saying:
- Writes Carrie Kerpen: Paper “revamps your Facebook experience and takes it from a simple social network to an incredible, fully mobile, visual display of everything you’ve ever wanted to read on the Internet.”
- “Facebook’s main app feel[s] ancient in comparison,” writes Ellis Hamburger. “In my week of testing, I found no reason to return to the Facebook app.”
- “Looking at Facebook this way is … so immersive and visually satisfying that you barely even care what you’re looking at,” writes Matt Buchanan.
- Writes Troy Wolverton: “If your primary exposure to Facebook is viewing your friends’ status updates, you might be surprised at just how much real news you can find on the site. Paper does an excellent job of highlighting that content.”
The takeaway for content marketers is this: The world is changing, and as technology evolves, quality content will be delivered to specific audiences that are interested in it. That’s why it’s more important than ever to create strong, unique content that is both rich and engaging—and has the ability to explode virally.
Edited by
Ryan Sartor
