Use Facebook Notes to spread the word

I have to admit that I, like almost everyone, don't use Facebook Notes very well.

This piece from Madalyn Sklar points out the best way to use them to help spread some news or information across Facebook. Since you can tag friends and Pages from the Note, it's a great way to start the spread of the Note within Facebook.

In her article, Madalyn looks at how a Note is written from a personal profile, but you can also do this from your Fan Page. By default, a new Fan Page does not have the 'Notes' app but this can easily be added by visiting the 'Edit Page' area and adding it from the standard apps.

You could use this for all sorts of things - maybe as Thank You notes to fans for coming to gigs including a photo of them (and tagging them in the Note so that their friends see) or for adding some extra detail to an event listing, as a place to jot down a quick post (perhaps a Tour diary entry) that you feel doesn't need to go on your main blog or even a repost of that blog post from your main site. The possibilities are pretty endless.

I'll be trying this out a lot more now that Madalyn has pointed it out.

Read her ideas here.

Video tagging on Facebook - a la SoundCloud

This is an interesting new app that could really take off on Facebook.

If you use SoundCloud, you'll know that the most listened to, shared and downloaded tracks or mixes are crammed full of annotations by listeners.

Clicking them and reading what people say about a track or a mix is one of the most compelling things about listening to stuff on SoundCloud. It's brilliant fan engagement. A mix or track with lots of annotation is also getting loads of social proof that makes you want to see why people are bothering to leave a note.

So, what if you could do this with video?

Well, that's what this app, BlipSnips, does. It's only a Facebook or iPhone app for now but it allows you to upload any video to Facebook and share it for that kind of tagging.

Seeing how this works at SoundCloud, I think this could be massive on Facebook.

More and more users are sharing video through Facebook, whether by dropping in links or uploading their own clips. Facebook is the fastest-growing referrer of video traffic, and users are beginning to upload videos to the site in higher numbers as well. And now a new iPhone and Facebook app aims to give you even more reasons to use Facebook as a video hosting destination.

The app, called BlipSnips, allows users to tag videos along the timeline. This is huge, because under the default Facebook uploader, users can only list friends who appear somewhere in the clip  Now, with BlipSnips, you can tag the exact moment on the video timeline when they appear on camera. Sweet.

Read the piece about it on ReelSEO here.

Facebook Tagging - a full guide

We looked at Facebook tagging a while ago in this post.

It opened my eyes to a tactic that very few people use on Facebook.

But, now, Mari Smith - an expert on all things Facebook who we've referred to before -  has written a post that is really a full guide on how to use '@ tags'. Her angle is about businesses using it, but it applies to musicians too - probably better in fact.

Tagging your Facebook friends in photos is one of the most ingenious and popular features on the site. Tagging friends in Notes is another use of tags, though used less often than photos. In September 2009, Facebook broadened this tagging feature by allowing users to tag friends, pages, groups, events and apps in status updates and posts. This type of tagging is referred to as an “@ tag.”

But, the big deal isn't in tagging photos or the like, it's in using tags to spread your posts right on to massive traffic fan page walls. There's a right and a wrong way to do this - basically spam will make you look like a twat.

Mari has the lowdown - read her post here - and use the technique.