It’s all about visuals, Facebook knows it well. It has the data from 1.8 billion people after all. You will find visual posts doing far better than text based post.
One reason is, no one wants to look at boring fonts and publishers know that this is why they used graphics, slideshows and videos to get their message on.
Facebook has been trying to make their text posts look pretty by making shorter posts look big in the newsfeed, as you may come across many times.
But not it is adding a few more things to it, colourful backgrounds, bigger fonts with emojis, all little things borrowed from its stories feature in Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger that was copied from Snapchat.
It’s not just taking inspiration from Stories, but also copying a feature from Twitter as well. And it’s the character limit.
Here is a screenshot of the newer feature shared by The Next Web.
Facebook will be limiting its new text post format with 130 characters, but it doesn’t take a genius to guess where this feature comes from.
Facebook may have simply kept the character limit to 140 but maybe it feared people will start pointing fingers, which they still are, even The Next Web gave a Facebook copied another feature’ headline to it’s story.
What happens to the current text-based posts?
While the new format will give users the options to spice up their text-based posts, I think the current feature of pasting long form text will remain there. Pages like Humans of New York have used the long form text posts to grow their pages and there are people who like to read long-form content.
Pages like Humans of New York have used the long form text posts to grow their pages and there are people who like to read long-form content.
Even Facebook Founder uses long form text posts to share stories, make announcements etc.
The new text post format will be for people who keep their posts limited to a few words, and a limit of 130 characters will make sure their posts don’t take up much space in the newsfeed.