Chris Brogan wrote about this several months ago (and now I can’t find the link), and he also mentioned it when I heard him speak last Fall: featuring Twitter, Facebook & other social media links prominently on your blog encourages people to LEAVE and go immediately to those outside sites, or via links in your twitter feed. Yes, they are enticed to interact with you via Twitter or Facebook, but don’t you really want them to interact with you via your blog?
I mentioned it too, in my discussion of getting comments on your blog vs. interaction on twitter – and it’s a good question/issue to think about. But I’m not sure it has an answer.
Here’s what I think – if a visitor is on twitter already AND they read your blog, they’re going to want to follow you on twitter and you should make it easy for them to do that. But I don’t think you want to distract them with tweets being fed through a widget on your blog to leave sooner than they might have.
Keeping visitors engaged on your blog is hard enough already, why make it easier for them to leave by featuring tweets? On the surface that argument makes sense, but in reality, twitter should be used as another tool to DRIVE people to your blog by posting links to posts and/or continuing a discussion you might be already having on your blog, OR even starting a discussion on twitter, then carrying it over to the blog.
Social media tools and blogs really must work together, but I think the answer is to find a balance. What do you think?
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It’s hard to balance blog bling and content. It depends on the goal of the site. We’ve recently revamped FMM to be the magazine it once was and took out most of the social widgets and other web attributes. The focus of our site is knowledge, not to show how “cool” we are by all of our extra links and widgets.
We’ve integrated a facebook fanpage and we have a TEXT link to our two most recent tweets, but that’s it. Since we’ve streamlined our appearance and defined our purpose, we’ve seen traffic increase 25%, RSS feed subscriptions go up 200% and email subscriptions go up 300%.
Our gut feeling was correct. It’s also brought on three new writers that we never would have thought would have wanted to be a part of our site. We also made comments more engaging and interactive with popularity ranking and Disgus about six months ago, it doubled the participation on the blog.
The less distraction, the better.
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i love that you were able to see direct results after changing your design (it looks great BTW) – it’s so important to continuously define and analyze goals. congratulations!!
I read something about this recently too and have been giving it some thought. But I’m not quite sure what to do. I think it’s interesting to see what FMM did and how much impact it had on traffic. Definitely need to figure out a way to promote more subscriptions.
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