The Birth of the Social Update & an Overdue Reintroduction
It’s good to be back.
Once upon a time I used to do this blogging thing nearly every day. I wrote for a few, started a few, and posted quite a bit for an older version of the Junction website, but here’s the problem (and I’m sure that you can relate): I had no interest in driving people to an outdated version of my company’s website, so I switched to alternative outlets: Medium and Linkedin.
I’ve got love for writing posts natively within a network like the ones I mentioned, but there’s really nothing quite like creating for your own site, especially one that you’re proud of, so here’s the plan: Now that we’ve just launched the first version of our new website, we’re going to start slow. It’s not like we don’t create content here – in fact I was just checking our Slack stats and we’ve written the equivalent of 3.5 novels over the past 4 months sharing content, rants and industry news with each other (between all of the stupid YouTube links, of course).
Our plan, ironically, requires us not to create more, but instead to curate the best stuff that we’re sharing with each other to post here. Our intention is to expand the exchange and debate that we have every day – sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it gets fired up, but it’s always interesting stuff about the social & advertising business.
One of my favourite things that we regularly share with each other is something that we call our Social Update: Every Monday morning I come into the office armed with what’s happened over the past 7 days. We talk about what’s trending, great campaigns and where the kids are (or aren’t) posting their selfies these days. More important than the news is why we should care and what it means for us. Everyone else brings their opinions, perspectives, and there’s usually a few important pieces that I miss – someone at the table is always sure to point out when that happens. The result is that we get a fresh look at the week and stay on top of the crazy, changing industry that we work in.
So that’s where we’re going to kick things off here: I’m going to let you into our Social Update, sharing not only the bits of news and trends of the week – a simple Google search could give you that – instead what you’ll get here is what it all means from our perspective: Our rants, our opinions, predictions and, a lot of the time, we’ll be guinea-pigging this stuff and reporting back from the Yik Yaks/Meerkats/Ellos of the world so that you don’t have to.
For our first week, in a fantastic twist of irony, the Social Update is about the trend towards creating content within social networks rather than linking to it:
Social Update – October 5th
Do you remember about a year ago when all that anyone seemed to be able to say about Facebook was that no one used it anymore, and that everyone was looking for better places to post their content?
What a difference a year makes.
The big news this week is more of a culmination of a lot of things that have been happening in the Facebook world, but the short story is that publishers and brands that are creating Facebook-first content are having a lot of success, and there’s more features coming to back that up.
We all know now that videos uploaded directly to Facebook massively outperform links to videos, and they’re taking that same idea to written content. Facebook notes are one of those nearly-forgotten features, like Pokes, that we haven’t touched in what seems like forever, but that may change in a hurry. The word is that Facebook Notes are going to become like fully functional blog posts – very similar to a Medium post – where we’ll be able to upload images, style text, add links, whatever we want. And the beauty is that it’s posted directly to Facebook so, like the videos, notes will almost certainly see higher click-through rates, share rates, and lower advertising prices.
image credit: SiliconAngle.com
Does that mean that we should all be ditching our websites for Facebook Notes? Of course not. There will always be value in owning your content (remember when Facebook had us all pay to advertise for Likes and then pulled organic reach?). What we’re seeing from the best out there is a segmentation of content. Some publishers put short videos on Facebook with longer stuff on YouTube, and we’ll likely see a similar shift in written content.
The people who I’m most concerned for are the guys over at Medium. Their big selling point was that you could quickly and easily create great looking content, then tweet it out to your network. It looks like Facebook has just done both of those things better, and to a bigger audience, and we can promote those posts. Poor Medium.
Or maybe that won’t be how things shake out at all, maybe it will be like the Email killer (Facebook Inbox) or the Eventbrite killer (Facebook Events) or, I shudder to even mention it, the Groupon killer (Facebook Deals). The beauty of all of this is that we don’t really know how the public is going to use a product, but what we do know for sure is that the people and brands that hop on board early get rewarded.
That’s it for this week.
Check back next Monday when we’ll be sharing all of the ways that everything has completely changed all over again.
Thanks for reading,
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