You spend so much time maintaining your blog, creating solid content, finding pictures, optimizing SEO, and managing your social media outlets, so when you find a time saver you want to take advantage of it. And I am all for time savers. Unless those time savers hurt your blog.
Many bloggers use NetworkedBlogs to automatically send their posts to their Facebook page. It is easy to use and appears to be a time saver, but in reality it is reducing the page views you receive from Facebook. How come? Networkedblogs opens the link to your post in an iframe if your reader clicks on the image or post title (they include a link to the full article at the bottom of the status, but most people don’t know to click there). So your followers are not actually clicking through to your blog to read the post, they are reading it on a NetworkedBlogs iframe. NetworkedBlogs is getting page views for your posts read by your followers.
Instead of getting link juice from NetworkedBlogs, you are losing page views.
How do you know that you are on a NetworkedBlogs iframe instead of the actual blog you thought you were visiting?
1. Look at the URL. Notice in the above image that the URL includes www.networkedblogs.com
2. Look at the flavicon. That is NetworkedBlogs’ flavicon, not the blog’s flavicon.
3. Look at the grey tool bar that is installed right above the post. If you click on those share buttons, you will share a link back to NetworkedBlogs iframe, not to the actual blog post. Which means that when your readers click on one of those social icons Networkedblogs receives your link juice in addition to your page views.
How to Share Your Posts to Facebook Without Using a Third Party Application:
After you publish your post, use the social share buttons at the bottom of your post to share your post to your Facebook Page.
I use the ShareThis plugin on my blog posts and can easily share to a variety of social media at one time. You can also customize what you say about the post and tailor it for the different platform audiences. The words you use and the picture you pick to go with the a link greatly affect how many people click through to read your article.
What if you publish your post in the middle of the night and don’t want to share it then? I have two posts that go live at 1:00 am when I am asleep. I share the link on my social media accounts when I wake up in the morning. However, if you really need to you can schedule a post on Facebook.
Have you found any beneficial time savers?
You know, I’ve been thinking of dropping Networked blogs as I’m not a fan of how their automatic push to FB and Twitter look. WordPress will also do an automatic push for me, if I want it. I’d also joined Stumbler quite awhile back but found it “not worth the amount of my time it would take to make it work” for me. Thanks for the info – I’d noticed this before when I went to forward posts to friends who weren’t on Networked blogs.
Great to see that others are as disappointed in how Networked Blogs works as I am. Thanks for this excellent and informative post, and for the link to my post about scheduling posts in Facebook. Despite the clunkiness of Facebook’s tool, it takes a lot of the need of using third party apps away, and that is all goodness.
Hugs and butterflies,
~Teresa~
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about NetworkedBlogs. A correction, though: the toolbar can be removed easily (Syndication Page -> Customize Post -> Hide NB toolbar). This will remove the toolbar for all your posts, even those published before you changed the setting (i.e. it’s a global setting).
Also, for any blog registered after June, the toolbar is removed by default.
Waleed
NetworkedBlogs
Thank you for sharing the steps for removing the toolbar. I will be sure to pass this tip on.