New RSS Subscriber or New Twitter Follower? Who’s Worth More?

I was wondering whether a Twitter follower was worth more than a new RSS reader. Let’s try to analyze pros and cons of both.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

First of all, we have to define what a RSS reader and Twitter follower are. A new RSS reader is a person who choose to insert your blog’s feed in his/her RSS reader and get your new full content very easily. At the same time, we need to keep in mind that sometimes your feed is stuck with other hundred feeds the new reader added to the feed reader over time, not paying attention to more than a few feeds. A new Twitter follower is, instead, someone who subscribed to your Twitter feed, receiving your updates while checking his friends’ Twitter stream. The more you use Twitter, the more he’s likely to come accross one or more of your Twitter updates.

In my case, I have lots of feeds I’m subscribed to but that I don’t read daily. They got refreshed each time I open my reader but I don’t really pay attention to about 70% of them. I guess this happens to lots of my RSS subscribers, too.

That said, as I wrote already, I’m using my RSS reader less and less since I’m finding a lot of great content recommended by people I follow on Twitter. Moreover, I found out that Twitter is becoming the first referral site of this blog just after Google. Does it mean something?

Well, it certainly means something important. Each new twitter follower is a potential new reader of your blog if you use it properly to spread the word about your posts. If you post a link to your blog posts at least three or four times a day (in order to cover most time zones) that link it’s likely to receive a lot of clicks by your fellow followers (and Hootsuite is a great service to do this at best). And if you do this for a couple of days, you” find out a lot of your followers missed it the day before.

Clicks coming from Twitter messages posted from Hootsuite

This is even more true if your followers are in the target of your blog and are selected properly. Ok, you can’t really select your followers, but if you use Twitter and other social media tools in the proper way, you’ll discover that you are kind of filtering your followers.

In conclusion, in my opinion a new Twitter follower is worth more than a new RSS reader. My blog’s pageviews are almost triplicating since I started using Twitter heavily, while the number of my RSS subscribers is almost flat. Did you get it?

Ok, now it is your turn. What’s worth more, a new RSS reader or a new Twitter follower?

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Tagged as: Aggregator, Feed Readers, Google, luca filigheddu, RSS, Social Media, Twitter