On the web, your website is your property. It is your real estate. The more traffic you have to your property, the more it is worth. If you have a website that gets traffic, it is just like having a commercial property at a busy intersection. Of course, people come to your website for the content that you have on it. When they arrive, you can tell where they came from, how long they stayed, and get a great feel for their usage of your site.
Facebook knows the value of content. They produce no content. Will they want your content?
What is Facebook?
I am not a FB user, but I picture it as the old network for some people that want to see what their immediate family and friends are doing. Oh cool, Len got a new truck, grandma made some pie. Joe’s dog has a broken leg and needs prayers. Uh oh, Samantha wants the USA to be a communist country, and Terry is no longer getting vaccines for his kids. Yay. BFD!
Maybe I just have weird friends, but I don’t know any of them that go to Facebook to read the news.
Facebook wants more content
According to a NY Times article, Facebook will begin testing hosting more news / entertainment content on their web property in 2015. Could this work out for companies like Buzzfeed? I can’t imagine ever giving Facebook any of my content, ever. Then again, I specialize in helping people’s content show up in search when people are actually searching for it.
Facebook has a bucket full of excuses, such as it takes “8 seconds to load a page”. I am dumbfounded here- I have seen plenty of slow sites, but 8 seconds? What are people using to load these sites, smoke signals?
Maybe it could work out well for both them and specific niches. I have tested content in the FB stream on several occasions. Real content, good content around a product I want to sell or even just a neat place- not a chance. Funny content, such as “you won’t believe what this cute puppy does” – yeah, that stuff has worked ON Facebook to an extent (if you call that “working”). So has content on October 30th called “Things to do on Halloween”. Entertaining, controversial stuff has worked out well for me, then again, that is what people go there for.
People don’t want to leave Facebook- they have clicked off and been pounded with pop ups, viruses, and other shenanigans too many times. Getting people to click off is tough and the clicks are decreasing and people are waking up to the fact that traffic from FB generally stinks. On several campaigns I have run, the ads have resulted in traffic of ZERO. It was like people clicked the ads on accident, or, something went horribly wrong. I’m not going to dissect it but I’ve known for a while something is terribly broken with the ad system.
I guess we’ll see how this plays out.
Here’s a funny image I’ve seen floating around social, unfortunately, I do now know the source but I will update this article when I bump into it.Conclusion
Hosting content on FB will probably increase readership for select media companies. If I owned CNN or something I wouldn’t be worried about this at all any time soon, especially if I valued my content.
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