Earlier this month, Facebook announced Paper (https://www.facebook.com/paper), a new service that allows users a more detailed look at their News Feed, offering customizable options, organization of their feed by category, and more.
For users, this means a different Facebook experience, one that gives them more control over what dominates their feed. But for those of us who use Facebook to advertise, it isn’t entirely clear how this will affect us. If you use Facebook as your primary means of social media marketing, one thing is for certain — things are about to change, even if we aren’t quite sure how yet.
Paper is launching alongside to traditional Facebook app, which means that users will likely choose one over the other. It isn’t entirely clear what features will be missing from Paper, but it seems unlikely Facebook would launch a new app, only to annoy its users by forcing them to switch back in order to do things like search and comment. Though admittedly, weirder things have happened.
Since the posts and pages that popup on a user’s News Feed will be organized and/or customized to the specific user, the way businesses and individuals promote themselves on Facebook and share content is going to have to change. This means posting only high-quality images, videos, and writing more interesting posts. If you check Paper out, you’ll see it seems to highlight photos and videos, displaying them in high resolution. So, posting a random low-res meme is now officially a very bad idea.
It’ll be interesting to see how Paper changes the social media marketing landscape. Will companies have to pay for promoted posts in order to force their way onto Paper? Will ads be a part of this new app at all? Only time will tell how this all evolves. It seems that keeping your Facebook page interesting and updated may now be more important than ever.
