Facebook and Twitter are social publishing platforms. As Adrienne Lafranche points out in The Atlantic (“Facebook is Eating the Internet“) publishers are now putting their content directly on Facebook, rather than attempting to funnel traffic from there to their own sites.
In a sense, these publishers, including the New York Times, are letting go of the fundamental principle that content should always lead to the provider’s domain, preferably in the fewest steps possible. Instead, content publishers are resigning themselves to a share of Facebook-mediated advertising.
This opens the question of what the value is “homesteading” on the social web. For our workshop on self-publishing, we’re looking forward to discussing how social media works as a publishing platform for writers. For example, is the blog still an attractive format if we can get more readers for our content using Medium with Twitter, LinkedIn and the like?
Join the conversation at our upcoming event The New Space of Publishing on 20 May (Register via Eventbrite).