Facebook is rolling out a new feature, releasing an Articles option for pages that looks a lot like a newsletter! If any one remembers Notes, they were a great way to get some lengthier thoughts out of your head and into your Facebook but were very much text only, with none of the fun features of a newsletter. So this is exciting news! This is not yet available for every one, so keep your eye on your page options!
This is a Pages only feature, so if you’re using your profile for your business, you don’t get access to this feature. If you are using your profile purely for your business, you’ll also be missing out on all the statistics and info you can get from Meta Business Insights. This new feature has all the insights that you get for a normal post, though I would love to see some extra features, such as number of reads and number of minutes the article is open/being read for. A real win would also be some way of tracking where customers get bored/click out/stop reading, which you can get from some of the better electronic direct mail (EDM) services.
A cover photo is an awesome addition – using a similar branded image every time you write your newsletter is a great way of training your audience to know when you’re writing in long form. Or you can update it every time with new advertising, new information and freebies. Heaps of great potential here for this.
You get a good suite of formatting options. I love strikethrough, it was so exciting when it came on the scene (boy am I old and weird, right?) and it’s just such a great thing feature to play with. I also use formatting in posts in groups and that’s been a really effective way to get attention onto key phrases in your copy, create meaning, and improve skimmability so I’m excited that I can use this on my page too now.
Direct links work in the text, though the details don’t get pulled from the metadata like it does in a standard post. So the links are active, meaning you can click on them and they are blue, but you don’t get the little preview images and text.
You also get paragraph formatting options, which is also fantastic for copy and skimmability.
If your page is still on Classic mode, you won’t see the ‘Article’ option and your post options will look like this:
The Article feature does not yet appear to be available in Business Meta Suite, so it can’t be scheduled in advance just yet. I think that when that feature is added, this will be the cherry on top of a well iced cake! This new feature rounds out the Facebook features list in an attempt to really become the all-in-one social media platform. What’s left to add to the Borg?
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