Importing an RSS feed (aka a blog) into my Facebook News Feed is really easy to do, you just hit settings on the top right of your News Feed and add your feed URL to the list. When you do this each new blog entry is placed in my News Feed – you are probably reading this now in Facebook!
What I don’t like is how Facebook takes your whole blog post and sucks it into their site displaying the blog post as a Note in your profile. You see, the value for the content publisher in this transaction is if I get people to visit my blog – www.jamessenior.com however if people can read each post without leaving Facebook then I lose that value. What is not clear to the reader, is that this content originates from my blog and Facebook simply importing the content. The only reference to my blog is down the bottom of the Post where I see a “View Original Post” link – in all honesty if people read all the way to the bottom of the post why on earth would they click to view the original post – they’ve just read it! To add salt in the wound you can also comment on the blog post right within Facebook, what would be really is if those comments were syndicated back to my blog, but that’s not possible right now.
You might think that I’m unhappy because of the loss of ad revenue – I’m not. The real value I lose it tracking the number of people who have read my content – i.e. the statistics and analytics. Facebook choose not to surface any of that information to me, so tracking readers/visitors is impossible. Funnily enough, like other content publishers, this kind of information is kind of important to me.
I much prefer the model that Windows Live currently uses to aggregate Web Activities in my News Feed. Here, they have chosen to just include a short excerpt of the blog post along with a prominent link back to the original article, thus ensuring that I get traffic to come back to my website.
My content deal with Facebook is a little one sided right now, whereas with Windows Live it seems a little more even. One solution would be to only publish excerpts on blog posts in the RSS feed but then my feed reader friends wouldn’t be able to read the full article. Ideally, I could configure how Facebook displays the blog post and whether you want the whole article published as a Note or a more prominent redirect to the original blog entry. Either that or give me analytics!