How to use Facebook to increase your readers and RSS subscribers
If you're not a Facebook then you've done well avoiding it - it's the latest craze in online social interaction (despite being little more than Myspace) with more than 58,000,000 users. However the key difference is that you can install applications onto your page - and that's the key to leveraging Facebook to your own advantage.
Get more readers and more RSS subscribers
Facebook offers a great opportunity to expose your content to new readers through it's native "notes" area (or through installable applications that add your syndicated content to the page directly).
There are a few ways of getting your content republished on Facebook. As normal Wordpress users (damn you) get the easiest option with the Facebook plugin which allows you to show the latest posts (and comments) on your Facebook profile.
However there are many of us who don't use Wordpress so what can we do? Fortunately the "notes" application on Facebook allows you to import posts from other journals/blogs via RSS. Therefore if you click on "notes", you can then view "my notes" and "import notes from an external blog". You provide Facebook with your RSS feed and theoretically each time your feed updates it is added to your notes.
Importing it through RSS isn't perfect
I've found that my Feedburner feed doesn't update my Facebook notes, meaning every few days I have to stop it importing and set it up again. Fortunately it's a 20-30 second job.
Why should I put my posts on Facebook?
I've found that my RSS views go up by 20-30% when I've recently imported a set of notes into Facebook - and that's a big difference. In all fairness every reader gained is worth it in my eyes and like I said earlier, it's reaching a new demographic.
Other ways to get your content on Facebook
It's not a big step to write your own Facebook application to add your RSS feed information into your profile. Hell, you could do almost anything with your own Facebook app, far beyond the limited constraints of things like "notes" or the Wordpress plugin.
I find Facebook is an exciting place to broadcast your content to; increasing my viewing statistics by 20-30% and potentially converting new users. Ultimately it's more exposure and that's a good thing for almost any blogger. Plus many of the high profile bloggers do it too.
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