by: AskPat 491 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 491 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.
All right. Here's today's question from Sheeran.
Sheeran: Does your software or instructional teach on how to incorporate an RSS feed of the podcast into Facebook?
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up Sheeran? Thank you so much for the question. Very simple question, but very important actually, because there is a point when it comes to automation, where you don't necessarily want to do everything automated just because you can automate it. You need to understand the ins and outs of the things you are doing. It's very, very tempting to set up an app or some sort of any device that allows you to automatically do things like post your blog posts as soon as you publish them, or a podcast episode. As soon as you do that, you can have these apps set up. You can use something like Zapier or If This Then That to set it up so that when you do that, when you publish, it gets automatically posted on social media.
Specifically when you do that on Facebook, it actually works against you for a number of different reasons. One, Facebook loves to promote things that are posted on Facebook. They don't like to show things because of their EdgeRank score and because everybody doesn't get to actually see everything that they want to follow or who they're following. There's a very specific algorithm that they use and it's based on a lot of things. Engagement and quickness of getting likes and comments and shares, and all those sorts of things.
If you post automatically to Facebook, chances are that that post is not going to be seen by a lot of people. I've seen the percentage at which the people who are following you on a page, for example. It's like 1%. 1 to 10% depending on your engagement. It's kind of ridiculous. Now, you can really benefit from taking just a couple extra minutes to post a link to that particular blog post on your own and doing it manually. That way, you're actually posting on Facebook and not having a third party tool come in and do that for you. That's kind of the worst offense, I guess you can say in terms of Facebook and posting. If you have a third party product automatically do that for you. I wouldn't do that at all.
Second tier is to take that link from that podcast that you just published, that YouTube video that you just shared, or that blog post that you just published, and put that link directly into Facebook. That's going to work a little better than having a third party program do that for you. But it's still not going to work because … Again, it's sharing a link to some other place other than Facebook. The best thing you could do is to actually create content specifically for Facebook.
This is what Gary Vaynerchuk's book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, a lot of it is all about because it's about the context on the platform that you're actually posting on. Facebook only really rewards those who post on Facebook, even when it comes to videos. I've found and I've tested that, when you publish a video specifically and only on Facebook as opposed to publishing on YouTube and then posting it on Facebook. You could still publish on both platforms but when you publish and upload directly on Facebook, those videos get played automatically. When people see them in their feed, they get more views and they also get a higher score in terms of the EdgeRank score and they're going to be seen and shared and commented on much, much more. I wouldn't do any sort of apps or automation to incorporate anything into your Facebook feed. I would try to make it as real as possible, as realtime as possible, and unique as possible.
The other problem with doing these automation things, even if you were to do it on Twitter, which you don't get dinged for that because people on Twitter, they just follow you with whatever post you share. It's impersonal. It's the title of the blog post and the link and typically, that's it. Or it might say something like “New On” depending on … “New On The Blog” and then there's a link. That's not going to give you very much room to get personal with that particular message. I always take just a couple extra minutes to create a unique message that goes along with that link on Twitter. I take a couple extra minutes to upload a video to Facebook or a couple extra minutes to share a message, and even one part of that particular blog post, on Facebook directly. Then tell people the URL for the rest of it, which brings people back to the blog.
So Sheeran, I hope that answers your question. I wouldn't do anything to automate an RSS feed into Facebook. No. I just would not recommend that at all. So try it out. You're going to see that you're going to have much better results when you just take an extra minute even, 30 seconds, to create a unique message that goes along with that post when you post it in Facebook. Especially if you're doing videos and stuff too.
Thank you so much for the question, Sheeran. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask from right there on that page.
Thanks again. I appreciate your time today and I look forward to serving you in the next episode of AskPat. Until then, here's a quote to finish off the day by Ted Rubin. He said, “Your value doesn't decrease based on someone's inability to see your worth.”
Cheers. Take care everybody and I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks.