Why We Removed our Blog Feed from Facebook

By Laurel Miltner | Posted Mar 3, 2010 | 7 Comment(s) | Filed in: Social Media

Yesterday, we decided to remove PR 20/20’s blog feed from our Facebook Page.

Originally, we had added the feed to our Notes tab, and all blog posts were automatically uploaded to Facebook via RSS. The downside to this, in our opinion, was that all blog posts were indexed as notes in Facebook. When someone clicked on a link to a post that came through on their wall, they were taken to our Facebook Notes, not our blog.

Why did we care? For several reasons, the biggest being that we want people to read our blog in its intended context. The formatting on Facebook looks fine, but without tags or categories associated with a post, it’s hard for people to find more information on a topic of interest. Also, navigating to our blog from Facebook Notes is kind of a hassle that requires several clicks, whereas if someone is taken straight to the post on our blog, it’s easy to find additional information (assuming they like what the read), such as:

• Other posts we’ve written on the topic
• Other posts by the author
• Information about our bloggers
• Our most popular blog posts

These are all ways that we hope to provide value to our readers, and they just got lost on Facebook. So, from here on out, we're going to spend the extra minute or so per blog article to manually post it to our Facebook Page.

Of course, as a marketer, there are other issues we considered such as inbound links and accurate information about how many people are reading our blog, but at the end of the day it really came down to giving people the most valuable experience with our content possible.

At least, that’s what we think. But what do YOU think? Did any of you come here from Facebook, and get confused/annoyed coming to the site? Did we interrupt your flow by taking you away from Facebook? Please, let us know how you prefer to see our posts, and if we were wrong to make this update, we’ll revert back to the Notes RSS feed.

Now, for anyone who’s considering removing their RSS feed from Facebook:

It took several weeks for us to make this decision, because in researching the process, we found no information about what would happen to the existing content on our Facebook page (i.e. all the blog posts that had already been fed to Facebook). Thanks to Alana Munro (@dawgpndgirl) and Ellie Mirman (@ellieeille) for your insight during this phase of this process.

Well, about 30 hours after removing the feed, all existing posts are still indexed as notes and on our wall. 

Here’s how to remove your RSS feed from Facebook, if you so desire:

1. Go to your Notes tab.
2. Click “see more notes” at the bottom.
3. In “Notes Settings” click “edit import settings.”
   
4. Click “Stop importing.”

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