The New Facebook Notify: What It Means To Marketers

Facebook Notify

Yesterday, Facebook announced the launch of Notify. The new app alerts people of timely news from the sources they care about most. Simply select the sources you want to follow and be alerted to important news right on your phones lock-screen. Swiping notifications will bring the user right to the story on Facebook.

These new notifications serve as a great way to get important news as it happens. They could also be hugely beneficial for marketers to drive an engaged audience to their content. Here’s how Notify could be a big deal for marketers.

What Facebook Notify Means To Marketers

To start out, Facebook has limited Notify to a small number of sources. The list includes companies like BuzzFeed, ABC, CNN, GQ Magazine, MarketWatch and more. But the release also mentions that they plan to add more sources in the near future. What type of sources Facebook looks to add will be key to it becoming a great way for more marketers to take advantage of a new way of getting audience attention.

Should they open the platform to a larger group of sources, or potentially all brands, we’d have the ability to not only share updates with our audiences on Facebook itself, but also notify them when an important event or update comes along. You can apply to become a Notify source here.

The challenge here is not to go overboard with notification. If you share every single update with your following through Notify (as I’m sure many would do), people will quickly ignore and unfollow. If it’s not breaking news, then it shouldn’t be important enough to push to a users lock-screen, unless done VERY infrequently.

Consider how often you’d be willing to have your day interrupted and how important an update would have to be to pull you away from what you’re doing. If you wouldn’t be cool putting aside the task you’re working on to read the notification then it’s not newsworthy enough to send your following.

Instead, we will need to focus on highlighting only the most engaging content. Not the stuff YOU find engaging but the stuff THEY really want to see. Things that can’t wait. Information people will want to know right away. News that impacts their lives this minute.

Planning Ahead

While the Facebook Notify platform isn’t open to everyone right now, and possibly never will be, it isn’t too early to start considering how you might use it to better engage your audience. What value could you provide them? What kind of information would you share with them RIGHT NOW that could improve or impact their lives this minute?

Would you create a new content strategy around this more immediate way of bringing your followers information? If the answer is ‘yes’, why wouldn’t that information be valuable to bring them right now, even before you have access to Notify? Maybe it’s time to start creating timely and important content for your audience today.

No matter if it’s creating the content now or having a strategy to create such high-importance content when Notify opens to a larger number of sources, thinking about how you’d highlight these items today will make you better prepared to jump on the opportunity (and beat out your competitors) if it comes along in the future.

Are you ready to produce must have information for your following?

Author: Ben Brausen

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