How to optimize your content for Facebook’s Paper newsfeed app

Facebook Paper

OK, you must be wondering Facebook has just launched its new newsfeed app called Paper, it hasn’t even been used by many people, not many reviews are available online, and I’m already talking about optimizing your content for it. In case you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about and what is this new newsfeed, head to this nice review on ReadWrite.com that says that this app is more about looks and less about the content it plans to broadcast.

Anyway, there is a great buzz all over the Internet and you may have already seen people fervently tweeting about the release. Sadly the app is only available for the iPhone users (well, it remains to be seen whether it is a good thing or a bad thing) and as iPhone users are prone to doing, they are blowing this thing out of proportion.

When you talk of optimizing your content what is the first thing that comes to your mind? What exactly is content optimization? To me it is

  • Creating as relevant and useful content as possible
  • Writing in a language that appeals to your target audience
  • Creating a captivating headline that draws people to the main article
  • Making your content shareable
  • Organizing your content – text – under appropriate headlines, sub headlines and bulleted points
  • Hyperlinking to further bits of useful and related information
  • Avoiding excessive use of images and videos (unless your content merely constitutes of such media)
  • Using the correct structured data markup

The last point is very important especially for the apps like Facebook’s Paper newsfeed app. Such apps use the structured data markup to identify the nature of your content and then adjust it in the feed accordingly.

The points mentioned above are the universal traits of content that is optimized for practically every medium whether you are writing for your blog/website or for social networking websites. The same goes for Facebook Paper. Use the right markup so that your content appears under the right section, create captivating headlines so that your content can grab people’s attention, write smaller sentences so that it’s easier to read them on smaller devices and as always, stick to the point.

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