Facebook’s Paper app, the new way to experience Facebook on iPhone (Android coming soon, probably), has been universally acclaimed to the point that it is generally considered the best way to use the network. Paper, with its all-new functionality of Cards, the sideways swipe, and curated content, doesn’t merely alter what we come to expect from the Facebook experience, but it presents a marked shift in how users will interact with brands (and vice versa).
The Return of a Pure Brand Experience
Straight out of the gate and shorn of all advertising, Paper is the first ‘pure’ brand experience on the platform in years. When you look at the Facebook card, it becomes your Facebook. It’s the Facebook featuring the brands and businesses you elected to follow, and only them. It’s almost a little jarring to experience a version of Facebook that is tailored completely to your tastes by inserting promoted products into your timeline.
It’s a throwback, and it almost certainly won’t last. What will cause the long-term shift in brand interaction is the inherent design of Paper itself. Moving forward, this change will force social marketers to consider how to design posts that best leverage this new format, and how to curate brand posts that will help gain them access to the topic cards.
Improved Experience for the User and Brand
There are two distinct user and brand experiences on Paper: Facebook and Topic Cards. The central hub of Paper, where most users will spend the vast majority of their time, is the Facebook card. When full-frame distraction free text and imagery merge as one, the immediacy behind each post quickly becomes apparent on the app.
Brands have been fighting over exposure war on Facebook for years – Paper could become the answer, or at least a hefty Band-Aid. The new dynamics of Paper punching in close on image posts and tilt-shift panning are something brands should be accounting for now. Improved user experience increases the likelihood of engagement, and brand posts that accentuate that new UI will become the new Best Practice. High-quality, eye-catching images entice users, but a retina screen coupled with a full-zoom quickly shows these as low-quality images on the app. In lieu of a high-quality image, brands should go without, and lead with a strong outbound link that will ultimately play into the all-new Holy Grail of social: the Topic Card.
Becoming Part of the “Personalized Newspaper”
Topic Card is Paper’s way for brands to reach an audience outside of their sphere of influence. However, activating that possibility is easier said than done. Curated by a mixture of editors and algorithms, Topic Cards are a culmination of Zuckerberg’s desire to turn Facebook into the “best personalized newspaper in the world” — your morning read with clear move away from the cliché of Memes and cat images. Putting out high-quality out-bound links will help you unlock Topic Card access. Although, high-quality is subjective and nebulous enough that this will keep brands guessing as they try to unlock the key to becoming an accredited Topic Card brand.
Paper’s single biggest win is that it makes content on Facebook digestible again. Up until now, brands’ single biggest hurdle on Facebook has been getting their content noticed by most of their audience to induce engagement. For the moment, Paper solves that hurdle, but it remains to be seen if users migrate en masse from the stock Facebook app to Paper to make any noticeable dent in brand engagement numbers.