Okay readers, I need your opinion. Should a small business company blog offer a full or partial RSS feed? Having participated in the blog world for over a year now, I’m 100% in favor of the full RSS feed. In fact, myself and others have written about how partial feeds are such a turnoff because we use RSS readers so we don’t have to always click-through to the individual sites to which we subscribe.
But, that opinion is largely drawn from my participation in the marketing blogging community - both search marketing and general marketing bloggers.
What happens when there is not such a large number of bloggers in a particular niche and your audience is comprised mostly of customers and end-user prospects who don’t maintain blogs themselves - or are even that familiar with RSS and blogging? Should your RSS distribution mentality change? Here are the pros, cons and discussion points we’re tossing around:
Why companies should offer a FULL feed:
- RSS content distribution is meant to give readers the flexibility to consume content on their own terms.
- Readers may not want to visit your site each time.
- Content is more engaging when can be presented in full in a Reader
Why companies should offer a PARTIAL feed:
- One goal is to get people to your site. A partial feed would get more people to click through to your site on a regular basis to see offers or other product information.
- Customers can’t purchase, request more information, or get additional resources from within their RSS reader.
- If the goal is truly to interact with your customers via your blog than you need to get them to the site for the conversation.
As I was writing this post, Stoney deGeyter posted about the full or partial RSS feed topic on Search Engine Guide. He makes a great case for why a full feed is good.
BUT, the goal of any small business marketing effort is, of course, a return on the investment and the time. Is a full RSS feed inhibiting ROI efforts or is it lending to a greater goal of community? Is community enough of an ROI factor? I’m just wondering if maybe the rules shouldn’t change slightly when it comes to company blogs.
Your thoughts?
Tags: business blogging, RSS, RSS Feed, small business marketing
I’ll only ever argue for a full feed, Patrick. I really believe that anything that makes it seem like you’re trying to control the message isn’t very customer-friendly.
Give the full feed and let the reader decided where they want to consume the content.
Per FeedBurner, there’s no evidence that partial feeds generate more traffic to a site. In fact with people like me unsubcsribig to blogs that are so lame they have partial feeds, you are likely to generate less traffic. If you have something of value in a service or product, people will find it and buy it with full feeds.
Wordpress bloggers have the excellent option of the Dual Feeds plugin developed by Stephen Cronin so you can now let your readers decide.
http://www.scratch99.com/2007/11/wordpress-plugin-dualfeeds-v11-released/
Hope this helps some people out and removes the agony of decision making
“A partial feed would get more people to click through to your site on a regular basis…”
I believe that to be a myth, based solely on my own habits. My reality is that I click thru much more often to blogs where I’ve read the full feed. This post is a perfect example, Patrick. No disrespect intended, but if I’d only read the first 2-3 sentences, I wouldn’t have bothered to click thru and comment.
Mark, Maurice, Kevin, Matt - thanks for the feedback and good discussion.
I was about 90% sure this was the response I’d get, but was wondering if people would have a different view for businesses blogging to an audience that isn’t as familiar with the blog format.
Part of what sparked the debate was a desire to have summaries of the most recent 10 posts on the front page of the site to avoid the long scroll. But, in Wordpress, this resulted in a partial RSS feed as well.
[…] RSS Feeds: Full Or Partial For Company Blogs? Patrick Schaber asks what you think is right. As for me, I’m 100% for full feeds every single time. Hat tip to Matt Dickman via Twitter. (tags: LonelyMarketer, PatrickSchaber, RSS, FullFeeds, PartialFeeds, Blogging,) […]
Full, full and full. Give me the full feed or nothing at all.
I agree with everyone, especially Matt. As a reader, I rarely bother clicking through if I can’t read the full post in my feed reader. In fact, I recently unsubscribed from a blog because it didn’t even give a partial feed, it only showed the post titles, and you had to click through to actually read the article. So, good bye to that one.
As far as the audience of a business blog being less familiar with a blog format, I suspect that the readers who are using a feed reader will be pretty savvy, and want to have a full feed.
The less tech-savvy readers will probably be reading the site by visiting the URL from a bookmark (or, possibly, by email subscription), rather than the RSS feed, so the partial feed vs full feed question doesn’t really apply to them.
I would have thought the partial feed would get more readers to the blog in question, but reading the comments, it would seem like the popular vote is full.
I agree with Adam, tech savvy people would be more likely to subscribe anyways. Good food for thought, thank you for giving me something to think on.
Tyler
For Full Feeds:
1) Content “theft” is reduced as your article/news is more company related and customer focused and is not as appealing to “thieves”.
2) Links within the content of the feed to other content on your site generates backlinks.
Regarding ALL your points on reasons TO use a partial feed, your customers are already customers. A LOT of corporate blogs are set up to communicate more efficiently with their CURRENT customers, NOT to drum up new business. Business is generated through traditional channels and the blog feed should be kept full to make it more convenient for current customers to receive your message.
Wow, great discussion! I love this format of communication because of the valuable, honest feedback received.
@Aaron - so, how do you really feel?
See you next Tuesday.
@Adam - great point about the less tech savvy readers coming from bookmarks. I should just figure that RSS readers are going to be more advanced with this method of consuming information.
@Tyler - I sort of figured many of the comments would support the full feed, but wanted some input to see if the business side of blogging would get any different reactions.
@Dave - You nailed it on the head. Most of our readers are going to be current customers because of the lack of blogging activity in the niche. They’ll know how to get information from us even if we provide the full feed.
In my opinion full RSS feeds are much better for me as a reader.
homeowners insurance for older florida homes…
compromised crumbles.requiring Crimea …
I’d have to agree with Mark on this one. Let the read decide where they want to gobble up the content. Isn’t that the way it should be?
This is a topic (like many on this blog, which is why I can’t help coming back here all the time) that is under constant debate virtually everywhere that it is raised.
I don’t think that there is a definitive answer, but as in most things marketing, test and tweak is probably the best thing that you can do.
It depends partially on what you are trying to achieve…
If you are predominantly trying to get readers on your site, then partial is more suited to achieve this role.
If you are trying to build a list of loyal subscribers, than you would probably more consider full feeds.
At the end of the day, you need to determine what you’re business objectives are, and then offer the feed that suits.