What is Facebook Paper?

iPhone owners who love Facebook are in for a treat. In early 2014, Facebook launched an app called Paper. As many have said, Paper is what Facebook would look like if it had been built in 2014. Frequent Facebook users, after spending a few minutes absorbing Paper’s magnificent visual presentation and horizontal scrolling, will switch permanently to the new app. So how can brands take advantage of this platform?

Paper presents users with a number of categories to add to their feed, such as news, sports and technology. Facebook editors handpick articles, and posts from influencers, to feature in these sections. With studies showing that social-referral traffic is becoming as important as search-referral traffic, brands should revisit the level of native advertising in their promotions mix.

Publishers have been reporting a massive surge in traffic from Facebook to their content. Social may be overtaking traditional search as the primary way users find news: algorithm-based or curated news shows up in users’ news stream, or users rely on Facebook as their primary search engine. Either way, brands need to maintain awareness by creating their own content and promoting it with native ads on Facebook.