Facebook for Bloggers
A few months back the Peppermint team were at a social media and SEO workshop where a trainer predicted that Facebook would try to encourage bloggers to use Facebook Notes as the platform for blog posts. She proposed that the reappearance of Notes in a more prominent location on the page suggested this to her. In August 2015 the ‘technocrati’ press was suddenly awash with articles on the topic of Facebook Notes and blogging, and even the some of the mainstream news media got in on telling the story.
Facebook Notes have actually been around for some time, but as every journalist has remarked; nobody used them and if you asked most Facebook users, they couldn’t tell you where to find them. There’s a very good reason that writers and bloggers didn’t really get into Notes; before 2011 there were character limits of between 160 to 5,000. However, since then the quota has been 60,000 characters. To be honest, that’s pretty adequate for the average blog: for example, a post of 1,000 words is around 6,700 characters. A novel is on average 500,000 characters, so you could publish your novel on Facebook in nine instalments. Hmmm, now that’s an interesting idea.
Facebook has announced that it is “testing an update to Notes to make it easier for people to create and read longer form stories.” If you haven’t explored it yet, just go to your page and look under ‘More’, where you’ll find it if you have added the App. If you haven’t added it yet, click on ‘Manage Tabs’ and it will take you to the Apps and all you have to do is click on ‘Add App’.
It’s worth taking some time to play around with the format and don’t worry about ‘going public’ with it, you can choose ‘Only Me’ as an audience while you work on perfecting your post layouts. There is a selection of audiences, including a ‘Custom’ one, that you can use to share your writing with specific people, or even block certain contacts from seeing it.
If you’ve ever posted a blog on WordPress, you’ll be happy to discover that the process is simplified version of that, and best of all there is a ‘Preview’ facility. When you finally hit ‘Publish’ it looks like a regular blog post with a full-width cover image. In addition, Facebook is testing “new ways to tag people, resize photos, and add links and hashtags to Notes.”
Is there a compelling reason to post your blog on Facebook in addition to on your website, or a dedicated blog site? We think there is. The case is this; more people are likely to see it. You may argue that you already post links to your blog posts on Facebook and that’s sufficient. However, you’ve probably noticed that it’s quite tough these days to get people to follow a link to an external website – if it isn’t in front of their faces, they won’t look; they may ‘Like’ because you’re a friend, but there’s no time now for more than that.
Facebook Notes in its new form may still be in a trial phase, but the industry experts agree that the fact Facebook is investing energy in the app suggests that Zuckerberg & Co believe that attracting bloggers to post directly on Facebook makes business sense and can be monetised. It may make sense for many bloggers as well – it’s time to try it and see!
If you need a blog or a new Facebook page for your business, please contact Jade Thompson at Peppermint Spain on +34 951 316 553 or mail info@peppermintcreate.com