This is a topic that you can go circles in, but it’s one worth thinking about if you have a blog because simply put, RSS feeds are your life line. If people want to stay up to date on the latest that your blog has to offer, this is how they are going to do it.
The problem, depending on how you view it, is what you put into that RSS feed.
For the most part, you know that you’ll have all your content displayed in all of its glory on your site, but for those that subscribe to your RSS feed, you tend to have two choices. Do you give them the summary or the full post? Let’s examine the difference between the two.
The summary is just that. It’s usually short and limited to a particular length of characters or words, depending on your settings or plugins you have on your blog. The point is that it’s basically a coming attraction of what’s actually on your site, but you have to load the web page in your browser to see the complete product. In the end, you are driving traffic to your site, which is what many content producers love.
On the other hand, you might actually hurt your chances of growing your audience due to users who rely on RSS feeds for much of the information they consume. This means that when they see your summary on their RSS aggregator, be it a non-browser program or hand held device, they won’t read your content in its entirety. In fact, some users un-subscribe from RSS feeds based on the soul fact that only summaries are available.
Full posts allow everything to be supplied open and freely to the world, getting your content to as many people as you possibly can. And generally, power users love this. They are able to read your content when and however they can. On top of that, if it’s something worth really noting, they will pass it on in a blog post of their own or through numerous other social networking outlets like Digg, Facebook, NowPublic, or Del.icio.us.
Will this affect traffic to your site in terms of stats? Honestly, it might. However, if you really care about getting your message out, this is something to think about. Stats versus a wider audience of your content. In the end, it’s up to you to decide as to which is more important.
Side note: If you are scratching your head over what RSS is, watch “RSS in plain english” by our friends at CommonCraft to help get you started.
Thank you for your thoughts, it helps me to migrate to full posts RSS feed.