Content Marketing Bulletin, February 18, 2016

Facebook’s Instant Articles is the big dog running at you in the park. Should you run?

Bulletin

by Peter Coish

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Facebook Instant Articles is about to go mainstream, Tumblr is tumbling, and curation is the new search. It’s today’s content marketing bulletin.

Facebook Instant Articles has been a hot topic for well over a year for content marketers.  On the one hand, it makes the process of consuming your content absolutely frictionless. On the other hand, it means those consumers are far less likely to visit your website, where the money is made. The late, great David Carr wrote about this dichotomy in the fall of 2014, brilliantly summarizing the situation as akin to a  “big dog galloping toward you in the park. More often than not, it’s hard to tell whether he wants to play with you or eat you.” Well, the time is fast approaching when content creators are going to have to come to terms with Facebook’s publishing product. April 12, to be more precise.

It seems like just yesterday (okay 2013) that social media experts were telling anyone who followed their Tweets that Tumblr was essential to a smart content distribution strategy. Well, what a difference three years (and acquisition by Yahoo!) makes.

“All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation.” It’s no secret we’re Benedict Evans fanboys here at Kuration.  And it’s because of insights like this. In a recent blog post, Evans discusses how search engines – and he’s not just talking about Google, but also the ones built into sites like Amazon – have become so big that they can no longer properly return search results that are truly meaningful to you. The answer, he argues, is a new form of curation.