Starting 26 October 2009, there shall be no more syndication of my blog posts on Facebook.
Why?
Well, the main reason is that I want to try out something.
I want to check if people will visit my blog if I don't syndicate onto Facebook.
From my judgement, I think people are not visiting my blogspot blog because they can get the same "experience" on Facebook as they would want on my blog - they can read what I post, and they have a feedback system in the form of comments and likes (which replaces the tagboard).
There are pros and cons to having my blog posts syndicated to my Facebook profile page.
The Pros:
•I'm making my blog posts more accessible to my 300+ friends, since they log on to Facebook more often than my blog - In a sense, I'm benefitting from the 'cluster effect' of Facebook, as a social tool/destination on the web.
•People get to comment on specific posts and I get to see which post they are referring to - much better than a single tagboard for an entire blog.
•Because many people log on to Facebook regularly (perhaps on their smartphones, even), my notes are more accessible than my blog. Not only that, but people can catch up on my latest posts more regularly and not feel as if I've written a novel while they weren't visiting my blog. Well, what do you expect when I update my blog 200+ times a year? (Though thanks to Twitter, that rate has probably gone down by 20% or so. As of this post, I've published 186 posts for my blog in 2009)
The Cons:
•My blog posts don't look good after passing through layers of layout adjustments - firstly my Mail.app, then Blogger, and finally, Facebook. Each step of the process, the blog post changes form - font, type (bold, italic, etc.), colour, size, alignment, it loses the element that I intended the post to have, and that's very irritating if you actually spend time & effort doing up all the fonts.
•Your blog might suffer as a result of people only reading your posts on Facebook.
I want people to realise that I actually have a blog, and my "Facebook Notes" are just a 'carbon copy' of my blog. Initially, I set Facebook to syndicate my blog because I want people to see a new 'note' on my Facebook profile page, and after seeing that, I was hoping that people would NOT click through to my Facebook notes, but rather, go over to my blogger blog. Obviously, that was wishful thinking on my part - people don't memorise URLs to others' blogs.
But now, I want to try out a little experiment. I want to find out if syndicating onto Facebook has any significant effect on the number of visitors/pageviews per day on my blog. As such, I am cutting off the syndication (possibly temporarily), and I want to see whether or not Google Analytics will log more visitors. If it does, then I can say that Facebook Notes does take away viewership from the original blog, if you're a small-time blogger like me. If it doesn't then maybe only a 8 people read my blog regularly, each visiting my blog twice daily (on average, I get 8 unique visitors per day and 16.59 pageviews a day.).
So do check out my blog if you've never been there before - http://ronfiles.blogspot.com
Note: if you're reading my blog via RSS (which I doubt, but then again, I won't know since I don't track RSS feed viewers), it still works. I'm just removing the RSS feed link from my Facebook Profile page settings.
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