Before you get all riled up, note that there’s a difference between a Facebook Profile and a Facebook Page. A Facebook Profile is what your friends have. You visit, you comment, you catch their updated statuses.
A Facebook Page, on the other hand, is a different beast.
Pages are usually created by companies or celebrities or, like in my case, bloggers. Pages allow a different kind of interaction. You can follow a page without really knowing the person behind it. And a page can have an unlimited number of fans, as opposed to the 5,000 friend limit for Profiles.
About a week after I started Marshallogue, I began posting updates to my Facebook Profile. My friends found it that way, along with my family.
About a month or so into it, I set up a Facebook Page specifically for the blog. I encouraged friends and family to join the page and get future updates that way, instead of crowding my Facebook Profile with daily posts.
After a while, though, I realized that no one but my mom reads the updates through the Facebook Page. I mean, every once in a while someone might stumble onto a post, but for the most part the page went dormant.
Instead, most people who really want to follow, except my mom again, sign up for email updates. That’s really the subscription I prefer.
Still, I’ve been offering both Facebook and email subscriptions for a while now, along with an RSS feed, which only matters now to people who already know what it’s all about.
Well, I’m making a change now. I’m paring down to just email.
Instead of offering a bunch of options for subscribing to Marshallogue, I want to offer just one: email. If you want to hear from me every day, I’ll send you a daily email. If not, no hard feelings. You can visit the site whenever you want on your own.
I think this move will do three things:
- First, it will force those who want to pay attention even a little, to make a decision: either pay attention each day or just drop in to the site on your own, none of this “When I happen to see it on Facebook” stuff.
- Second, with less options, I think it’ll actually lead to more subscriptions. I’m not really pursuing subscriptions full force right now, but maybe sometime down the road it will matter more.
- Third, it’ll free me up to try an experiment I’ve been considering since the top of the year. Stay tuned for that (and by “stay tuned,” I mean subscribe by email). 🙂
If you happen to be one of the readers who follows through Facebook or RSS, please consider getting the email version. It’s free (forever). If that’s not your thing, though, I understand. Just visit whenever you like. I’ll be here.
Lastly, if you’re already signed up by email, thank you. It’s true what I say on the subscription page: I really do appreciate you more than you know.
