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12 Nov This post is from from my other blog here 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:
Why companies should offer a PARTIAL feed:
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?  none
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4.00 (Good) Vote:
November 2007 If your blogging goal is to engage and have meaningful interactions with your customers, you're doing this just by gaining and keeping their attention as a subscriber....they shouldn't really have to click through every time...although that obviously has its benefits...
On the other hand...because you're dealing with new RSS users they could be more willing to clicking through to specific content, because the whole experience of browsing headlines of their chosen feeds, from one central location is so valuable and new to them. Also, partial feeds could cause people to view more pages because the content is clearly displayed through the feed reader...and they can get to it easily and maybe even faster than by browsing the site... Hm...I can't decide now...  Reply
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November 2007 bansi - thank you so much for jumping in on the discussion. It's the new RSS users I'm curious about. When I first started with blogging, a full or partial feed did not matter to me as I was more interested in joining the discussion on the site. I'd click-through regardless. As I got more into everything, I started to prefer the full feed.
But, based on the response on my site, I think most are leaning towards the full feed.... Reply
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