Not too long ago, email newsletters were considered dead and a defunct form of marketing. But that soon changed when companies such as Substack arrived and revived the space.
Following up on the same, now the social media behemoth Facebook wants skin in the newsletter business too and is willing to shell out a pretty penny for it as well.
According to a recent media report, the Facebook Newsletter service is currently in the testing phase and might soon integrate with Facebook Pages. And as part of the testing phase, it will be paying some individual writers and content creators to take the product for a spin!
Facebook newsletter product has not been named yet, and initially, it will be rolled out to a small group of users only.
Sources familiar with the development have revealed that this newsletter tool from Facebook will also allow its writers to set up an individual website outside Facebook’s ecosystem. Furthermore, it will help them charge interested recipients for subscriptions, engage their community, and create a potential revenue stream for themselves. But that’s not all.
Facebook will also let individual writers who will use its newsletter product create Groups for their work and provide them with metrics to monitor essential KPIs.
This latest move from the social media behemoth comes at a time when the newsletter business is booming across the entire digital space.
As mentioned earlier, this was majorly due to products such as Substack, which revived the newsletter space with a similar strategy that Facebook aims to adopt for promoting its own newsletter tool. Initially, Substack had paid advances to multiple bigwigs to bring them on board as well.
Facebook Newsletter: Others Want A Slice Too!
Note here that Facebook is not the only company wanting to grab a sizeable portion of the revived newsletter business. After observing the success of writers on their platform, the microblogging social platform Twitter also acquired a newsletter platform called Revue in January to make sure users remain within their ecosystem.
The only difference between Twitter’s efforts and that of Substack and Facebook is that the popular microblogging platform didn’t opt for paying writes to make them use Revue.
While all looks promising at the moment, there is a slight chance that Facebook’s newsletter product might face some backlash from its U.S. users.
The social media behemoth has long been the recipient of severe criticisms from both liberals and conservatives for the way it tends to moderate its platform. And now, the success of its newsletter product might heavily depend on which writers they poach for their program.
All in all, Facebook trying to get into the newsletter business is a classic example of the social media behemoth wanting to grab a piece out of every single digital business pie that can be integrated with its core offering – Facebook.com. Be it audio-based social networking or a Zoom alternative, Zuckerberg will always manage to come up with a clone and squash the existing competition. The data-hungry beast doesn’t look to have its stomach full despite having unparalleled access to users’ personal and professional data.
How will its newsletter product perform once released? Only time will tell. Until then, stay tuned for more updates.
