Facebook is rumored to be redesigning the Notes feature to compete with Medium. Medium is a minimal blogging platform. I say minimal because the formatting and images are minimal. Its becoming popular with journalist and others for writing and sharing ideas.
Facebook has has the Notes feature for as long as I can remember. They haven’t changed it much in years. Until the rumors this week I had totally forgotten about the service. I know I have used it to import an RSS feed in a page back in 2009. Outside of that I can’t say I used it much. I went looking for notes on my personal profile but I couldn’t find any sign of notes.
If you’re not familiar with medium, the new blogging looks very similar to the blogging currently on LinkedIn. On LinkedIN you have one main picture and basic text. It allows you to get your message without a lot of fuss on how the text will look or what images to use.
Is this a good thing for your brand? Content marketing is one thing I really love with brands. It shows a personality you can’t get in other forms of media. I don’t think anyone should put all their marketing in one basket. I warn brands I work with not to put everything on Facebook. Its good to have a blog, website and other properties out there. Facebook has known to change things without warning. This could cause issues with current marketing campaigns.
One big issue I have with Facebook is you can’t export your data for pages. Unlike personal profiles there is no way to export your page information. On a personal profile you can save your information, pictures and feed. Pages offer no such take away. If Facebook changes this policy and deletes the service all your posts could be gone.
In the next few weeks there should be more information coming out about the service and how it will be managed. For the time being stick with your favorite blogging platform.