This week, Facebook launched Rooms, a new iOS app created by the team at Facebook Creative Labs led by the former Branch co-founder Josh Miller.
In his introductory post on the Rooms blog, Miller announced his intention for the app to resurrect “the role of the internet as a ‘third place,'” resurrecting the community and connectivity formerly found in “forums, message boards and chatrooms” during the early days of the web.
What might this modern reimagining of an Internet ideal look like? Miller explains:
“A room is a feed of photos, videos, and text – not too different from the one you have on Instagram or Facebook - with a topic determined by whoever created the room. Early users have already created rooms for everything from beat boxing videos to parkour to photos of home- cooked meals. There’s even a room called “Kicks From Above” that showcases photographs of cool shoes in cool places.”
The app is designed for users to create and join Rooms based around passions and interests; the Rooms currently populating in the oh-so-meta “Recommended Rooms” Room, for example, include: Parkour Spots, Photography Lovers Unite!, Live Music Fuels the Soul, Backpack Diaries, and — my personal favorite — Noms From Above.
The user experience on Rooms is also designed to be mutable. Room creators are not only in charge of the Room’s theme topic, but can also customize the look and feel of the Room. Again, according to Miller:
“Rooms is designed to be a flexible, creative tool. You can change the text and emoji on your like button, add a cover photo and dominant colors, create custom “pinned” messages, customize member permissions, and even set whether or not people can link to your content on the web. In the future, we’ll continue to add more customizable features and ways to tweak your room. The Rooms team is committed to building tools that let you create your perfect place. Our job is to empower you.”
However, in a break from Facebook’s emphasis on authentic identity, Rooms offers anonymity. Rooms allows users to create different usernames and identities for the myriad Rooms they enter. And unlike the equally myriad apps that the average smartphone user likely has connected to their Facebook profile (like Spotify, Uber, Venmo, Tinder, etc), Rooms is an entirely separate entity (i.e. you don’t need a Facebook profile to log in).
Is Rooms The Next Big Opportunity In Content Marketing?
Like many other forum-focused platforms, Rooms has an inherent appeal — or at least, inherent potential — for marketers. Its raison d’être, after all, is to create a stream of images, video, and text around niche topics, as its pithy, nonchalant tagline “Create a room for whatever you’re into” suggests.
Galvanizing niche communities around a shared passion is the ultimate end-game for content marketing, and several other social networks have incorporated forum-esque elements with varied success.
(Think Communities on Google+, which bears the tagline “Talk about the stuff you’re into with people who love it too,” or Groups on LinkedIn, which were created to “provide a place for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share content, find answers, post and view jobs, make business contacts, and establish themselves as industry experts.”)
LinkedIn Groups have proven particularly successful for B2B marketers, as Jason Miller, Senior Manager of Content and Social at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, made note of in our conversation about LinkedIn’s content marketing opportunities earlier this year.
Miller named Groups as one of the underutilized marketing tactics on LinkedIn, highlighting HubSpot’s Inbound Marketers group and Kapost’s Content Marketing Academy as standout examples. Jason Miller explains the benefits of LinkedIn Groups as follows:
“The key to a well-run group is to have set rules that you enforce, and have someone who moderates the discussions. Groups are a great way to build a dedicated community and foster conversations with your target audience. It’s a very powerful strategy when you can manage a group and curate the conversation.”
Will the Rooms app foster conversations with dedicated communities? Well, only time will tell. Like anything else on the Internet, its powers could be used for good or for evil.
For more on Rooms, read the complete introductory blog post here, or download Rooms for iPhone from the App Store.