Earlier this month I told you about the possible new update to Facebook Notes. Well this rumor has become reality and is now being rolled out to the masses. The new notes are pretty cool and I am going to play with these. So why is Facebook doing this?
In my opinion they don’t want to be left out of the longer content market. They are connecting with people who want to write more but don’t want to go through the hassle to set up a blog. This will be perfect for them. Layout and design are very clean and easy to use. Its actually pretty simple to create a post. Much like your Facebook profile you have a cover image and then can insert pictures in post.
If you are using a blog platform this maybe a little to simple for you. There are very few text styling options. This means you have little control on what the final project looks like. Yes you have simple controls like bold and italic as options. However, you don’t have control over orientation of the text. There is no center or right flush. One thing that I really don’t like is linking. Yes you can insert a link but you can’t hyperlink text. You may have to do, Whataburger (http://www.whataburger.com) a lot in the post. On the flip side you can tag Facebook pages in your post.
While it may give you total control over text it does have some nice features. They include bullet list, number lists, H1 & H2 tags, quotes, insert picture and brackets. Which you see two of those in the picture below. Its super clean and as of now it doesn’t have any advertising in the sides.
It will be interesting on how people will use this. I posted an initial post on why I love Whataburger. Its a simple post because I wanted to give it a quick try. Go read the post, it was quick post so don’t judge me on it! To me it’s very similar to the way LinkedIN does posts as well. If you have been engaging in people on there this will be simple for you with out much of a learning curve.
This is the Facebook official picture of what the new service looks like:
It has a new look in the newsfeed as well:
The picture on the left is a newsfeed card while the right is the way it will appear to readers. It’s very clean and nice.
One thing that is very disappointing is that its not available for pages just yet. Much like other features Facebook usually releases it for consumers then pages come second. This service could be used to start a content marketing or expand what you already do. It wouldn’t be good to just copy and paste what is in your blog here. I would suggest maybe doing a quick recap weekly on Facebook of your top blog posts and link back. It would be great to do original content on here as well. Until we see how well it plays out I would start out shorter and judge how things go and expand as you gain readers.
To access your notes go to Facebook/Notes