Following in the footsteps of Twitter, which recently made its incorporation into the newsletter world official, Facebook is now joining the paid news universe. And it is doing so by developing its own platform, of which it has already given some details about how it works.
Facebook executives have stated in an article that their main motivation for the creation of this new platform is to support independent local journalists, a modality of work that is on the rise.
In the article published by the social network’s management announcing their initiative, they explain that as writing professionals increasingly publish their work independently, they need a solution to help them reach new audiences and develop their businesses.
Facebook is strongly committed to supporting local journalists who are often the only voices representing a given community. The same is true for freelance writers, so the social network is kicking off its new project by partnering with a small group of them.
The support tools offered by the new platform
In order to facilitate and promote content creation and audience growth, the platform offers:
- Free tool aimed at designers, which will allow you to create standalone websites and newsletters.
- Integration with Facebook Pages to enable publishing in multimedia formats.
- Creation of Facebook Groups aimed at consolidating and building community loyalty.
- Help for the public to discover new content and writers with ease. At the same time, favouring the direct relationship between creators and their audience.
- Insights that make it easier for writers to understand the performance of their content.
- Monetisation tools that enable the creation of websites and businesses.
- Acceleration services that make it easier for creators to come together to incorporate best practices.
- This platform will be associated with the Facebook Journalism Project, an initiative that provides tools for journalists to produce better content for their readers, strengthening the connection with them.
This initiative, born in 2017, was created with a view to improving the quality of information circulating on and off Facebook, and to increase engagement with both the media industry and readers. It was designed to support journalism in general, and also as an attempt to boost the media literacy of the public.
What Facebook newsletters will offer us
Writing professionals will benefit the most, as this platform will help them to increase their followers and boost their mailing lists. At the same time, newsletters with paid subscriptions will be a source of revenue for content creators.
Another expectation that Facebook expects to see fulfilled is that this service aimed at strengthening ties between journalists and freelance writers will be aligned with previous initiatives with major newspapers. Thus, through newsletters it would be possible to access content within the network itself, such as news sections.
Although there has been no official announcement of this project to date, information provided to the New York Times estimates that it will probably come into operation in the summer of 2021. For the moment, it is in an incipient phase of a development that, from the outset, is promising.