A relatively underused application, Facebook Notes has been recently updated to give a better blogging experience on the platform. What Notes allows you to do is bring content into your page in a more detailed manner, very similar to the format of LinkedIn posts.
Blogging has always been a really valuable way to give your audience an insight into who you are, your skills and expertise, and to share more relevant content to the people that want to hear it the most. Now you can blog without leaving Facebook, and Notes is allowing your followers to discover more without having to click away.
Notes was first developed by Facebook as a way of giving you more characters to play with, as when it was launched, Facebook only allowed you 160 characters to summarise your thoughts, building to 420 in March 2009 and upping slightly through 2011 to finally bring you 60,000 characters in November 2011. Notes therefore, enabled you to share more words and thoughts with your audience initially, but has since felt outdated and unnecessary.
Since the update last year, Notes has become more relevant, and gives you more flexibility with your posts. You can publish a Note as a page or an individual, and with page engagement dropping on a daily basis, we thought we would trial it out to see how it differs to a standard post.
Notes is extremely easy to set up, it gives you the option of having a great visual at the top, as well as images in the post itself, allows you to add tags (individuals or business pages) and hashtags too. Once you have finished writing your Note all you need to do is publish – or save as a draft to come back and publish at a later date. You can also limit visibility should you need to, or keep it publicly available.
You can access Notes either from your top bar or through your status box – just click Notes, and you can start writing.
Facebook has obviously taken on board the amount of clicks away from the site that is happening, and so Notes is a way of keeping people within its walls. However, for the user, as easy as it is to publish a Note, it can be quite restrictive and also doesn’t drive traffic to your own website. What we have tried to do with our Note is give a taster of a blog post with a link to further details on our site, to try to encourage people to click away and read more. By blogging entirely on Facebook, it means you don’t own the content and you aren’t getting any measurement to how many people have taken the time to read it and spend time on your own site.
We are impressed with the updates to Facebook Notes, and are seriously considering using it within our own page activity, but it remains to be seen as to if it will help businesses with their engagement, or whether it keeps people away from your own website.
What are your thoughts? Please get in touch and let us know!