This post originally appeared in our April issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and…Mashable?
In early February, albeit relatively quietly, the top website for news in social and digital media introduced Mashable Follow – a “social layer” that is the first big move in Mashable’s journey towards becoming a “true news community.”
This seemed to be a long time coming. As the scope of the Mashable blog has increased alongside the popularity and mainstream coverage of social media, Mashable has battled with a signal-to-noise problem. They simply provide so much content — over 40 stories each day — that it’s becoming more and more difficult for readers to find the content they want when they want it without constantly checking the site and clicking through topic tabs.
Carefully named a “layer” and not a “platform,” Mashable Follow allows readers to log in via Facebook or Twitter, set up their own profile page, and through following people and topics of interest, curate their own content and turn Mashable into their own personal social and digital media news stream. Some of the Top Topics include Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, Social Media, YouTube and Foursquare. Users can even earn badges, adding a neat gaming element more common in geolocation apps like Foursquare and Gowalla.
Here’s a brief description of Follow:
We’ve said before that when appropriate, brands need to become publishers. They can’t simply sit idly by as their competitors create valuable content to satisfy audiences yearning to interact and engage. However, when a brand is already a publisher, what’s the next step in engaging audiences? Mashable is laying the foundation for more publishers, and brands turned publishers, to create a deeper level of engagement and customization. It allows the brand to own the channel while its audiences/users can curate the content in a way they prefer, thus making it easier to find and share the content that they’re interested in.
Creating such a robust and personalized owned media channel ultimately empowers audiences to increase a brand’s earned media. This is a feature that I’m sure news outlets have coveted. But only Mashable, with their 3,400,000+ followers across social platforms and 12,000,000+ monthly visitors, has a sample size big enough to see if this idea floats.
Not quite a social network, not your common media news site, Mashable is now a unique dichotomy. The intriguing question is, what’s next? We’ve never seen a publisher move to a platform quite like this. Is this just the tip of the iceberg for publishers? Is Mashable just the first of many on the horizon to gain an audience through content and then turn that audience into a social network?