Facebook is frequently updating their platform and while many people waste their time complaining about these improvements, ultimately they are helpful.
A new great way to use Facebook to it’s best is to take advantage of the opportunity to easily upload a bunch of photos at the same time! This was reported yesterday along with the new Timeline layout rollout which they’re testing. If it works, and people show how to use the new features well, they’ll roll them out to everyone!
- Facebook adds drag-and-drop bulk photo uploads, tests Timelines changes (The Verge @Verge)
- Facebook allows users to drag and drop photos into publisher for faster sharing (Inside Facebook @InsideNetwork)
I’m still not able to upload multiple images to my Social Sparkle & Shine page, but I find that even isn’t a problem for me – I was on Facebook myself long before I started my business page – and while there were ways to upload multiple photos at once to Facebook before, it’s now a feature they’re promoting on your personal profile.
I have a much larger audience on my Facebook personal profile, compared to my agency page… and Facebook makes it more difficult & costly for me to reach my audience anyway, so I don’t mind.
Although text-only updates are shown to more people than pictures/links updates, I like to update Facebook Timeline with pictures, because then you can ALWAYS edit your text & links – immediately correct typos or add forgotten links, or edit the Call To Action CTA a few months down the road, when you want to drive your audience to a different page or a new offer on your website.
The benefit of the multi-photo upload is that you can still always update the text & links, and each image in the album/group upload has to be individually edited, so you can either have the same text & page links all at once, or edit and adjust each one to be slightly different & way more valuable!
It’s super easy to do, just select multiple images and load them all up at once (we’ll just see if my flip-book cartoon loads in the correct order…). While Blogging Update: Nope – and there doesn’t seem to be a re-order images option, so you still have to select each image upload individually in the order you want… This does slow things down a little, but it also means that when you do it, few other people will!
The other point to note is that while you can edit the ext/links of individual images, the group upload / batch doesn’t have any editing options, similar to how you aren’t able to rearrange images…
Here are a few brainstormed ideas of how you can use this feature for fun, to entertain your friends & customers or to promote your business:
Click links for examples on Facebook:
- Animated flip-book style that shows a progression of an entertaining story
- How-to makeup tutorial, linking to a video or pinterest infographic; I also really like this Makeup your Jangsara: Tutorial: Brain-eating zombie for Halloween
- Party progression to tell a story of what really happened (a la the Hangover)
- The 5 courses of a fabulous restaurant meal or a VIP spa experience
- Multi-Step Recipes or Cake-Decorating timelines
- Behind the scenes of playing a prank on someone
- Weight Loss Progression
I like the idea of creating a progression of surprising images in a theme, all linking back to one blog post, as I did here. It’s a little complex to plan & create the bit.ly link before the post is even up, but most times you won’t be uploading multiple albums for example as I did for each of the image albums above…
Whitepapers and Playbooks referenced in this blog post are available free to download and share in my Social Media Concierge Public Resource Library on Google Docs.