Facebook will soon help publish your newsletter, but we aren’t sure it’s a good idea

Newsletters have a been a staple of artist-to-fan communication for some years, and while email has historically been the best tool for this, Facebook is now getting into the newsletter biz, but whether or not this new option will be good for artists is still up for debate.

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

Newsletters are the backbone of artist-fan communication, and finding the best email service provider is essential for most artists. There are plenty to choose from and sometimes it takes a while to find the best fit, but a new alternative could be a social platform that you’re probably already on – Facebook. Yes, newsletter creation is now on the list of features that users will have at their fingertips soon, the company just announced.

According to Facebook:

“In the coming months in the U.S., we’ll introduce a new platform to empower independent writers, helping them reach new audiences and grow their businesses. We will start by partnering with a small subset of independent writers. The platform will include a variety of support focused on content creation and audience growth, including:

• A free, self-publishing tool with robust styling options to create individual websites and an email newsletter
• An integration with Facebook Pages to enable publishing across various multimedia formats including photos, live videos and stories
• The ability to create Facebook Groups and nurture a community of readers
• Features to help audiences easily discover new content and writers, and in turn help those creators build direct relationships with their audience
• Insights for writers to understand how content is performing
• Monetization tools to build successful individual websites and businesses, starting with subscriptions
• Accelerator services to help creators come together and learn best practices”

The newsletter creation feature may be a response to Twitter’s recent acquisition of Revue, a company that specialized in just that. Even so, Facebook has several significant advantages in that it already has 2.8 billion users with 1.8 billion of them active every month. That means the potential reach for an artist is much greater than by any other method.

However, while this feature may start out free (no word on this yet), you can sure that the service is betting that it will be able to charge for it down the road. The feature sounds tempting, but remember what just happened to Facebook in Australia in that the company’s long reach might not always be as long as it seems.