In Part I, we discussed the impact Facebook Marketplace will have on college newspapers across the country. This time around, we’re talking about what college newspapers will need to do to fight back. Many campus dailies have been publishing since before World War I, so they certainly aren’t going to roll over and die just because Facebook is poised to first audience, and then revenue, from the lucrative classifieds market.
As I did in Part I, I’ll be using the independent newspaper at The University of Kansas, officially known as The University Daily Kansan, but affectionately referred to as just the Kansan, for all my examples. These strategies will be applicable immediately to other similar college newspapers, and eventually to their professional metro counterparts as Facebook’s growth continues to accelerate beyond the college campus.
Like any good game plan, college newspapers must attack this opponent on several fronts, leveraging their strengths, while exploiting the competition’s weaknesses. Let’s take a brief look at the Kansan’s position in the classifieds market:
So both the Kansan and Facebook have the audience, but while Facebook benefits from strong interaction with the students, only the Kansan can reach students away from their computers. In order to compete with Facebook, the Kansan obviously has to use its strength of print readership, along with its strong online products, to its advantage. But just as importantly, the Kansan needs to grab hold of an opportunity that just recently presented itself to interact with students on the same level Facebook does. This opportunity comes from Facebook itself.
Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for third parties to develop applications for Facebook users that integrate with their community in exactly the same manner as Facebook’s in-house applications like Photos, Groups, and the Marketplace. Content from outside sources can now be integrated into both individual users’ profiles, and the News Feed each user sees on his or her home page.
Let’s use a quick example of a theoretical application that allows users to declare what color slinkies they prefer. When a user, Juan, clicks into the application, and agrees to the terms of service, he will then choose a color, say, “green.” Juan’s slinky preference would then appear in a module on his profile page, so everyone who visits his profile would learn of his affection for green slinkies. And many of his friends, upon logging into Facebook, will be presented with a message on their News Feed reading, “Juan wants to share with the world that he loves green slinkies. Which color is your favorite?” accompanied by a picture of a green slinky.
This is the exact same level of promotion that the Marketplace enjoys, and is the reason that just two weeks ago, it was poised to take over the college classified marketplace. Michael Arrington, of Tech Crunch, notes,
Facebook is giving an unprecedented amount of access to developers. The API would allow, for example, a third party to recreate Facebook Photos, the most used photo application on the web. Users could then remove the default Facebook Photos and install the third party version instead.
Applications can serve their own ads and/or conduct transactions with users.”
Perfect. But instead of replacing the heavily-used Photos application, the Kansan needs to replace Marketplace as the standard classifieds vehicle for Facebook users at KU. Other college newspapers need to do the same.
Forget about charging students for classifieds. They’re not going to pay a dime to sell their stuff or find subleasers. Small amounts of cash are for integral elements of the college experience, like textbooks and beer. So give away the classifieds for free.
Free your advertising staff of the increased load in student classified placements. If you don’t have existing online infrastructure for viewing and creating new ads, find a talented student or three and develop one. If you can’t find student developers available at your university, buy pre-existing college classified website software.
Place the free online ads from students into your print edition for free, too. This is the greatest advantage you could ever hold over Facebook, and is what will make your product useful to students who choose to use Facebook’s Marketplace as well. And in case you’re not doing it already, make sure to get all of your paid listings online, too.
Integrate your entire online suite of products into the Facebook platform. Use an application on Facebook to drive traffic to your news site by parsing a feed of all your news stories onto its front page, with links to the actual stories on your site. Allow students to recommend stories they like, with each recommendation resulting in a News Feed item. Classifieds integration must to go deeper than the news. Explore the option of providing an interface to post ads through Facebook into your own classifieds site (and your print edition as well). Allow for full browsing of your classifieds within Facebook, but make sure to emphasize to student visitors that all ads are placed for free into the print edition when using your custom classifieds app instead of Marketplace. And of course, each new posting results in a News Feed item. Make it dead simple for students to post to your site, eliminating any significant barriers to using this product. And if your Facebook app gets enough traffic, consider incorporating modest advertising on it into upsold packages for your existing online advertisers.
Make sure users of this product understand your newspaper is providing this content, not Facebook. While students will be directed to your content via Facebook, it should be obvious where the content is coming from. Don’t let students get the perception that all this cool stuff is coming from the Facebook team.
Promote the heck out of your new online suite. Run house ads in print that encourage students to hop onto Facebook and join your newspaper (news/classifieds/whatever) app. Provide the join URL in the ad, or even better, provide a redirect URL, ie kansan.com/facebook which’ll then point to the Facebook page. Launch with a contest; each user of the app gets entered to win weekly prizes from sponsors. Notify all users of the winner via News Feed to keep strong top-of-mind awareness. Make frequent mentions on your news and classifieds websites.
Over at the Kansan, they’ve got steps 1-3 taken care of. Everyone else: you’ve got catching up to do.
Campus newspapers may have a captive audience on campus with their print editions. But when it comes to the internet, Facebook has the students’ attention. Use Facebook to support your campus newspaper’s online products, and watch your online audience grow rather than erode.
What concerns and suggestions do you have? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Ryan,
Great thoughts on fighting back against the Facebook jauggernaut. Im curious to hear what your approach would have been a few days ago (before the newly open facebook API was introduced).
Also, what about the draconian nature of the terms of use for the Facebook API. What happens when Facebook decides they are tired of Hawkchalk using their network and cuts your access?
Kristofer,
I talked to Ryan last night about this exact thing, but I'll let him reply to that himself. As a developer myself, anytime you sign away that much of your rights to something you created it worries me. Even insofar as Facebook can then take what you developed and sell it, royalty free without your permission.
I just don't agree that developers should work hard to do facebook's work for them.
Now, Ryan and I talked at length about his point five, and I don't know how facebook would respond to this. It'll be interesting to see, but the example I gave him, without branding, would be the same effect you got with some, e.g. 'Who is your ISP?', 'Internet Explorer'.
I think that college newspapers though need to be working more on selling their online advertising to their core user base, that is, alumni. The print product can continue to target the students who are picking up the paper on campus, but then focusing on delivering targetables for a more national audience online.
That is unless you can drive more student traffic back to the online site as Ryan proposes with Facebook, then its a win, but you better make sure that you're not just diluting your own brand.
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