Facebook: the powerof the Notes Tab

The notes tab in both your personal Facebook page and on Fan pages can be a very powerful tool for promoting yourself or your company’s brand, or message. Among many other possibilities for use both personally and for your business (to be discussed later on), the notes section allows you tofeed in your RSS from your blog thus exposing your message to the virility benefitsof Facebook.  

First, one important note about notes, lol.  What you post in your notes will be posted on your wall as well by default (truncated to about 8 lines of text) so this may become very annoying for your friends if your blog is rolled frequently. Secondly, if you are adding a blog that has a long list of entries (been around for a while) all these will push through to the wall the first time (each entry will create a separate wall post) so do this very late at night when everyone is asleep as to not bombard your friends and fans.  Also, your personal profile notes and fan page notes operate a little differently, which I will describe soplease read on.

Adding a RSS feed (blog) to your personal profile page is a little more straightforward than adding one to a fan page; fan page notes has less controls on the redistribution of the contents. Before you begin you will needthe URL to your RSS feed from your blog. You can retrieve this by going to your blog and click on the RSS icon and noting the url. Mine is http://dannyjjohnson.com/rss2.aspx, Note: if you click on this link you will see just a bunch of text all grouped together with no formatting.

With the RSS url in hand go to your personal profile page (profile page not your home page) and then if you do not have the Note tab visible click on the + sign to add a new tab and select notes. Now go back to your wall tab and look for the options link (just under the share button) and click it and then click settings. Under the Available Sites section look for the Blog/RSS link and click on it. Then just copy and paste your blogs RSS url you retrieved earlier into the Public URL box and click Import. Once successful you can now navigate back to your Notes tab on your profile page and your blog should now appear there. One note about the updated of this feed, which will not be immediate, so be patient of your blog takes up to 24 hours to update. If for some reason it does not you can go back to your profile page’s wall tab and look for the options link (just under the share button) and click it and then click settings. Under the Imported Sites section look for the Blog/RSS link and click on Update Now.

At this point you will have noticed that the first 10 or so lines from your blog was posted to your wall which may or may not be desirable depending on how frequently you update your blog. If this is more than a few times a week this may quickly become annoying or seem spammy to your friends.If so here is how you can change it. Navigate back to your profile page, then with the wall tab selected click the Options (look under the share tab) then click Settings, and down at the bottom look for Application Settings, then click there. Next on the Applications Settings page look for the Notes section,then click Edit Settings. Then look for the additional settings tab and uncheck the box that reads Publish to Streams, which will keep your notes from automatically publishing to your streams.

Tips for blogs that feedinto your personal profiles

• Here are a few things to consider when creating a blog that will feed into your personal profiles Facebook Notes.
• First as a good practice create a short introductory paragraph including a title since this will be shown in your stream for all to see and needs to attract their attention.  Remember that they will only see the first 3 or 4 lines of text everything else will be truncated. 
•  Facebook will not handle the html from your blog entirely the same so it will not appear the same when it is pushed through the Notes tab. This is because there are some html tags that are not supported and the css that is attached to your blog feeds.  As a side note I plan to test podcasting into notes, but at this time I’m not sure if it will work.
•  Again be reminded that all your entries will be posted into your stream on your wall so if you have an old blog this may create some problems with your friends when you first add it. Like I said before do it late at night so no one will notice and hopefully it will all have been pushed out of the way when everyone is awake and back on Facebook. One trick to avoid this is to add the notes tab first then go to Options>Settings>Application Settings>Notes>Edit Settings>Additional Permissions and uncheck Publish to Streams as described earlier. Then you can add your RSS/Blog which will not post to your wall with your entire list of blog entries.
•  Sometimes when you manually update your blog you may get a NO entries found, just keep hitting the update button and it will pick it up.

Setting up a blog or RSS feed into your note tab on your Facebook personal page is a powerful tool as we have seen. In the next post I will share how to set up a RSS/Blog feed to a fan page and also elaborate a little more asto how this can be advantageous to your marketing strategy. 

 Danny Johnson brings you weekly tips on online marketing as an extension to his Seminar Series. Unraveling the Web: Effective Strategies for Online Marketing. To subscribe to this blog go to Danny's Blog