Facebook as Rss Reader?
I love rss as maybe you do. But analyzing stats of many sites I have access to, I noticed that, compared to visits, rss driven traffic is much lower. FeedBurner says Rss users are hundreds (one or two), a very little slice of many hundred thousands visitors per month. If I speak with friends who do not work in/with the web (but often use the internet for personal purposes), and mention Rss, they usually don’t really know what I am speaking about. They might have heard the word “rss” but they think it refers to something that is related to programmers, not just a very useful service. That’s why I though about trying a different way to syndicate web contents: because Really Simple seems not to be simple enough*.
With my first experiment, I created a new Facebook profile, named as the site brand; played with the profile a little bit (info, pictures etc.); added my private profile as a friend and added my personal contacts that might be interested in the site industry as friends too. Then with the Rss -> FriendFeed -> Twitter trick (google it to know how), I set the profile status to be updated with every new content the site publishes.
The result is that every friend sees every new content published by the site in its Facebook Home, as if it was a sort of Rss reader.
Yes of course it’s not, there are many features missing, for example: if the new content is published when a user is off-line, that content might be skipped by that user; the “history” of the published contents is not available; the site “feed” is mixed with many other stories etc.
For the first week I added as friend every person FB suggested, then released the pressure a little bit and let friends of friends asking for friendship; I added a few “not automated” status and replied to the most interesting comments from time to time so that the profile didn’t look like a complete robot.
Facebook still does not allow a single profile to have more than 5.000 friends, so I also created a fan page with the same name.
After a couple of months and thousands friends, facebook.com / referral is the second absolute traffic source, just after google. Isn’t it cool? :)
The Rss -> FriendFeed -> Twitter trick does not work in real time, and sometimes on a site publishing breaking news, timeliness should not be an optional. So I wrote a simple php script that hooked to the cms, istantly pushes the new published content’s title and link into a Facebook profile and/or on a Facebook Fan Page wall.
At the same time one of my friend was looking for a WordPress plugin that did the same thing, and was not happy with the existing one because (he said) he had to create a Facebook app in order for the plugin to work (and he also couldn’t use Php5). The challenge was easy to win: here is my Facebook Status Updater plugin for WordPress.
* I live in a country where only 42% of population regularly uses the internet, DSL connections are not (and it seems will not be) available for 6 milion people, WiMAX networks are not available and apparently not supported by the governament, for various reasons I am not going to discuss here.
