Since my self-introduction to feed readers, my list of subscriptions to blogs that interest me has grown considerably – and my inbox stays relatively free of clutter.
Each morning, I take less than a half hour to scan through the latest posts of about 25 blogs or so. The posts are in one convenient location, the unread ones are nicely highlighted for me, and I have no distractions.
But there is one aspect that I hate – and I mean really hate. I can’t stand blog post snippets.
Here I am, intrigued by a catchy headline. My radar zeros in, my interest perks. I start to read the post, and joy, I was right! This is a great po-
Hey. Where the hell did the rest of it go?
Yes, that’s right. A feed limited to delivering only snippets means my joyous morning read is cut off mid-interest with a lovely link asking me to click to read more.
My first reaction? CLICK – I’m gone. I mean outta there, onto the next post, goodbye. Snippets feel very much like the blogger doesn’t respect me – they just want my click-through to their blog. Do I give it? No way. That snippet and click-through costs me extra time, deviates my attention and takes me right off track.
Snippets may have their purpose, but it sure isn’t to cater to readers and serve visitor loyalty. It’s a traffic-driving strategy.
Listen, folks – if your blog post on your feed is good enough, I will click through. I’ll comment. I’ll take note. I’ll visit your blog – on my own damned good time, thank you very much. I’ll recommend your blog to others.
If you snippet me contanstly, then you better believe that by the fifth day of getting gypped for a good read mid-post, I’ll be clicking that “see ya, unsubscribe” link for your blog.
Too bad – some of these snippet-happy blogs are good ones. Just not well delivered, is all.
And as any good writer knows, delivery is everything.
Thanks for the insight! I was thinking of trying to find a way to create snippets for my blog, but now that I see it from this perspective, I’m going to stick to the full text in my feeds.
Hi Courtney – good idea. I find I’m more motivated to go comment on blogs when I have the full post right in front of me in my feed. Glad to have you aboard!
Hi James
What reader are you using?
ees
Hi back, Eldon. I use Google reader. I’m a Gmail fan, so I have that application open at all times. Google Reader was the most natural choice for me, because… well, it was right there in the “more options” of Gmail.
Does the reader have anything to do with full or partial feeds? (I’m a little new to feed readers, forgive me… but I love them!)
Frankly, never gave it much thought before your comment on Wordpreneur. Could be any number of things since I wasn’t fiddling around with the feeds, or didn’t think I was. Still could very well be some inadvertently changed setting on my WordPress installation. Will poke around next I get a chance.
ees
It’s a good idea to look into it. I’ve been poking around the net this morning and full feeds seem to have a better rap. Problogger ran a survey recently that showed 75% of readers prefer full feeds – many people seem to unsubscribe to feeds when they’re partial posts.
Check with your feed burner program because the options may be in there as well (I should know the answer to this but it’s early, hm?).
Hiya James,
I used to feel the way you did, and up until the beginning of last year, I was a committed full feed guy.
Until I read a report or POV (can’t remember which) that had me think of the blog’s home page as the front page of a magazine.
With full feeds, one gets 1-3 chances to catch the eye of a reader and draw them in. With partial feeds you get 8-10 chances of catching the reader’s eye. I agree that some people do the partial feed badly and should be taken to the wood shed for it.
I appreciate partials because, let’s face it, as copywriters we know that if the headline and lead are bad — it ain’t gonna get better from there. So in my aggregator I scan through the headlines and partial leads to see what I want to read.
The Problogger survey is interesting, yet my stats (and those of client blogs) have shown that when it comes to partial vs full feeds, partials give me lower Bounce Rates and more Pages/Visit and more Avg. Time on Site.
That trifecta makes me happy.
So there it is, another POV. Hope it helps.
Wishing You Much Success,
Walter Terry
http://www.ROIcopywriter.com – Greater ROI Through Strategic Sales Writing
Hm. You have me contemplating.
To date, I’ve met some arguments against full feeds on other posts, one of which notably involved the blog owner saying she didn’t give much of a care to what her readers wanted, she just wanted her blog to look good and have no one steal the content. (I no longer care to read her blog, either.)
Stats and keeping people on the site are valid responses in favor of partial feeds. And I get this. And in fact, as you said, I do have some feeds that use partial posts that I’d never unsubscribe from because they fit the golden rule: they interest me with their snippet enough to get me over to their site.
Perhaps I’ll have to look at this from another perspective – that of using snippets to their fullest potential. If I can’t get someone interested in my blog with a good snippet, then my blog doesn’t deserve to be read. Good point.
As I’ve said elsewhere (maybe even here), I think it’s best if you can offer your readers both full and partial. I happen to prefer the snippets that annoy so many others.. but that’s MY preference.
I switched to offering both around three months ago – maybe four. Prior to that I only offered “snippets”. Since offering both (and making full the “default” you get if you just click on the icon in Firefox for example), “full feed” subscriptions have gone from 0 (well, duh, I didn’t offer it!) to 108 as I write this. But partial feed subs – and remember, these are not the default, you have to go out of your way to get them) have gone from 377 to 435 – which is about two thirds of the full.. that tells me that I’m hardly alone in my preferences..
Oh, I also added a note in the partial RSS feed that adds “Full text RSS feed now available” and a link to every snippet.. so you’d think that a lot of the old partial feed folks would have switched if the really hated the partials.. but if they have (if some percentage of the 108 came from switchers), then the number of partial preferring readers is even stronger than it looks, right?
So the issue is hardly cut and dried. You can follow my stats on this at http://aplawrence.com/Web/fullorpartial.html if you are curious.
@james
“survey recently that showed 75% of readers prefer full feeds”
But that survey isn’t “readers” so much as it is “bloggers”. Bloggers opinions of your pages are of course important, but they are not necessarily indicative of your ordinary readers preferences..
The results came from those who read blogs… and who reads blogs more than bloggers? I’d say it’s a great representation of perhaps not the ordinary reader, but the most important reader.
The “most important reader” ?
Maybe. I’d say that depends on your niche. I get a few bloggers reading my site, but it’s of little interest to most – too techy. Bloggers read in fairly narrow bands.. so they might indeed be the most important readers here, but they are not everywhere.
Regardless, do you really want to annoy 25% if you have a choice? I don’t, and that’s why I offer both types of feeds. I also offer feeds by email – something I don’t like myself, but more than 100 of my readers have signed up for that..
Gotta give the people what they want, right?
Important may be the wrong choice of words – in French, important can mean majority and therefore, important in weight. Sometimes my brain skips into the wrong language like that.
But you’re preaching to the choir – my point is to offer full feeds, which you do. You go one extra mile and offer both, which is amazing. For those who have to choose partial or full, I’d say the weight is in favor of full. No?
Absolutely – if you cannot do both, you should do full. No question.
But.. the only excuse for not doing both is that you are using some lame platform that you have no control of.. I know that’s unfortunately true for a lot of bloggers and as they lack technical skills they can’t “roll their” own..
I’m surprised FeedBurner doesn’t offer something where you could give them a full feed and they’d automatically produce both.. it’s trivial enough to do..