In which I attempt to make this blog available on Facebook

So gazillions of people use Facebook, and often ask to follow my feed there.

Unfortunately, I’m not really willing to friend unknown readers until Facebook lets me separate personal from public content.

Since that day will probably never come, I have set up a Facebook page. I think it is here. You can also find it by searching for “Chris Blattman’s Blog”.

I say “I think” because I am a Facebook ignoramus. I need two sorts of help.

First of all, there are probably a few things I could do or enable on the site to make it more pleasant to use.

In particular, I am not even sure how you become a fan and if becoming a fan makes it easy for you to follow my blog on thew platform.

Second, apparently I need 25 fans just to get a url or page name. Please help me out here if this is interesting to you at all.

Comments welcome.

8 Responses

  2. It’s a shame that people feel the need to establish a presence on Facebook just to reach those people who want to consume everything through that site. Back in the old days we had the “web” and it defeated the walled gardens other companies tried to establish. And now we’ve taken the big backward step of involving Facebook, a single – and unethical in most practices – company, in too many of our interactions with internet content.

  4. I second on Viktor’s comment. Get on Google+ and start using it as your blog platform.

    For a great example of how to use it for blogging, go to http://www.kevinrose.com. Not only will it serve as a good place to post, but also allows for a lot more blog interaction.

    Last, with Google+’s Circles feature, you have complete control over exactly the problem you specified with Facebook above, the problem of separating personal from public content. The Circles take care of that for you.

    Plus, it might take you ten minutes to figure out Google+, maximum. It’s a relatively intuitive interface. If you need an invite to Google+, I’d be happy to send you one.

  5. Use Graffittii RSS (search on FB for it) to pull you RSS feed into your page. Much more elegant than Notes and unlike notes, has a direct link back to your blog. I get 20% of my traffic this way.

  7. Instead of creating a note, you can simply type in the link to each post in the section that says “write something…” To become a “fan” or “like” the page. There is a “like” button on the right of your page’s name that is only visible to people who are not following your page on Facebook. For example, if you type in “Simple Cooking with Supal,” you will see the button on the right of the title.

    Also, when people “like” your page, your page acts like another Facebook profile. This means, when you post a blog entry, link or status on that page-it will show up on their newsfeed. (I hope I am answering your question here.) A Facebook page is great publicity/advertising. People are also more interactive. If you take a look at Nicholas Kristof’s page, people share their thoughts and beliefs by commenting-great way of getting involved with your readers. It is where I get most of my traffic from on my blog. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

  8. I’ll be interested to see how this works for you; I’ve been using NetworkedBlogs through Facebook and it sends a whole lot of traffic to my blog, just using the Feedburner feed. I’m not sure how it notifies people that there’s a new post (though it automatically sends a link to my profile page and I’m some guessing people click through from there), but it seems like the only way I’ll ever get some of the people who want to read my blog on a consistent basis to use RSS (which they either don’t understand, don’t like, or outright fear).
    If the blog fan page works for you, though, I might switch…