Will FB Newswire Impact Your Business' Social Strategy?

You may have heard that Facebook and Storyful launched FB Newswire yesterday. The service, run via a Facebook page, seeks to be a resource for journalists by aggregating “newsworthy social content shared publicly on Facebook by individuals and organizations” through the page on Facebook and its Twitter feed, @FBNewswire.

The good news is that Facebook will evaluate posts based on quality of the content and the quantity of genuine interactions (shares, likes and comments) to bring FB Newswire followers news that the Storyful team determines as valuable. This opens up an opportunity for official Facebook pages, especially for companies whose business, industry or point of view is related to the news.

A natural progression from the Facebook for Journalists page – which was introduced in 2011 and currently keeps more than 1.3 million Facebook users up to date on various topics of importance to journalists – FB Newswire has established itself as a social media newsroom through its partnership with Storyful in this venture.

PRNewswire was quick to publish a blog post detailing what PR pros need to know about the newswire and we couldn’t agree more with a few pieces of advice they give for branded Facebook pages, including the fact that posting content that people will want to share remains an essential ingredient. This is true no matter what purpose your page is serving – for recruiting, for sales, for brand awareness. Understand what kind of posts and content resonate with your followers. Don’t be afraid to test out a few different strategies – culture-highlighting photos, videos, surveys, humorous posts and cartoons or point of view statements on industry trends – and now especially, the news. No matter your strategy, your primary goal is to deliver quality content that is shareable – it will grab and keep the attention of fans, as well as give you a chance at being shared by FB Newswire.

Likewise, utilize multiple visual images: 90 percent of the information transmitted to our brains is visual. Plus, we process visual content 60,000 times faster than text. Social lends itself well for visual sharing. Newsfeeds become cluttered with a variety of text, photos, videos and ads, making it extremely important for your brand to differentiate from all of the clutter with different forms of content that will catch and keep the attention of your followers. This was true before FB Newswire, and it’s truer now judging by the posts that getting picked up there.

And most importantly, act fast. FB Newswire has already been sharing posts from individual users that have videos or photos from breaking news sites. While a brand won’t typically have someone on the site of a brush fire or hurricane, nor would sharing that be beneficial to their message (unless you are a firefighters unions), it can be among the first to comment on relevant industry news – i.e. security companies that spot a piece of malware or internet vulnerability as it is beginning to make headlines across trade and business publications should immediately post their PoV on Facebook. If the story is big enough and their post receives substantial interactions, FB Newswire could share it and further establish the company as experts on the topic.

So, if you haven’t executed on a strategic content plan for Facebook, now more than ever is the perfect time to start.

Oh and PS – in the time it took me to write this blog post, the FB Newswire page earned more than 2,000 new likes. Am I a slow writer or is this thing really taking off?