I learned something today from two of my readers, Nick Temple and Michele Martin about to add the "Share on Facebook" and "Digg This" links to your posts automatically on typepad. These options might be called "Social Media Optimization" (more here)
Nick asked the question. I replied by email with a cc to Michele. I saw this on her blog. She responded with the instructions (I posted here)
I decided to make a quick screencast.
Now, I have some questions. I need to explore whether there is a way to see at glance and side-by-side comparison which of your posts have been added to del.icio.us, stumble upon, facebook, etc. Looking at the numbers may give you some indication of what your readers thought was valuable. I would like to see if number of comments correlates.
What I'm really curious now is your behavior. When you are reading this blog in a reader, to you use the feed flare options? When you come to the page itself, do you use the feed flare options? Why or why not? I'm trying to figure out if this is useless extras on your blog or can be valuable.
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RE: your question about whether or not numbers of comments correlates to numbers of posts saved on delicious, etc. My anecdotal experience has been that my posts either get saved a lot to delicious, with few comments OR not a lot of saves, but more comments.
It appears to me that the posts that are more "how-to" or resource kinds of posts tend to get saved or shared. The posts that generate comments don't seem to have the same impact--they mostly seem to invite conversation. Again, this is just an observation on my own blog--it could definitely be different with other people.
What's interesting about this for me is that it forces me to wonder how I'm measuring value on my blog. I go back and forth--do I want people to save a lot of my posts or do I want them to engage in conversation? Ideally I want both, of course. But it doesn't seem to work that way. I wonder if I'm the only one who has this experience?
Posted by: Michele Martin | November 27, 2007 at 05:04 PM