I was about 80% finished with this post…had about 300 words or so written. It was the same old post you’ve read over and over about whether or not you should provide full feeds or partial feeds. I even had a twist thrown in that related directly to journalists. My thesis was going to be that the superior writing good journalists can provide is reasonable case for partial feeds, which is something I never thought I’d say.
Then I took a peek at the stats for our web traffic here, and I had another idea.
As you can see, we’ve been extremely fortunate in these first couple of weeks to get links from Instapundit (pajamasmedia.com), and that’s the number one source of visitors to the site so far. It was quite interesting to me to find that Twitter is our number two source of traffic to the site. And I started thinking about the ways that Twitter resembles a partial feed.
Setting up your site to post to Twitter every time you publish is almost the same as providing a partial feed with one huge bonus–it’s instant! The people who are on Twitter when you publish and are following you want to pay attention to you at that moment. They don’t feel as though you’re trying to trick them into visiting your site. In fact the very reason they are following you is because they want you to tell them immediately when you’ve published something new so they’ll know when to visit the site.
It’s permission marketing at its finest!
So, by all means, continue to give full content in your feeds. You have nothing to lose. And don’t miss out on the great opportunity to use Twitter as a pseudo-partial feed service.
Similar Posts:
- Making RSS Your Friend–Burning Multiple Feeds
- Making RSS Your Best Friend — Reading
- Do You Really Need FeedBurner?
- Changing the RSS Button in the Address Bar
- Is Your Newsroom Using Twitter? Effectively?
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