Facebook Paper for Marketers

Today Facebook introduced Paper, a mobile news reading application for IOS and Android. Paper combines your Facebook Newsfeed content with bundles of selectable pre-packaged news content to create a super slick mobile news experience. Given Facebook’s scale, access to content of interest, and the quality of the App, marketers need to watch Paper. So let’s take a look.

The install is very easy. Since I have the Facebook App installed on my iPhone, Paper did not even ask for my Facebook login. Less appreciated is that Facebook sent me a text informing me that I activated “Code Generator,” which was not expected or appreciated. Upon launch Paper plays loud non-optional intro videos. It also displays several animations explaining the functionality were much more useful. You add some content sources and start exploring.

Paper might be more slick than Flipboard, and that is saying something. While Paper has a subset of Flipboard’s content, they have your friend and interest graph which makes things much more relevant. For now at least, there are no ads.

So how do you get your content into Paper? Well, you are either in the Newsfeed or you are in the pre-packaged content bundles. The bundles are Facebook Timeline updates from media companies. So unless you are a media company, you need to get people to like your Timeline. Happily, there is a direct link to pages you have liked. Clicking on the Page brings up your content in the Paper interface.

At first glance it appears Paper preferences content with images over like/comment/share engagement. Compared to the standard Facebook mobile app, Paper is much more visual, so that makes some sense. Paper also displays more Page content than the standard Facebook app or the Facebook web view. So perhaps they are weeding out corporate content less aggressively with Paper. Or maybe they are just preferencing visual content. In any event, Paper is another reason to publish more content and more images to Facebook.