الاثنين، 17 ديسمبر 2012

FeedBurner Migration - Watch out for FriendFeed!

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FeedBurner Migration – Watch out for FriendFeed!

If you’re migrating from FeedBurner to FeedBlitz, one of the challenges is making sure all the subscribers come along for the ride – that’s why there’s a lengthy Migration Guide to help you get it right. The processes and features we have in place work great when you follow the Guide, but we have found a wrinkle (courtesy a client) over the weekend that’s worth highlighting to make sure a large number of your readers aren’t lost in the shuffle.

And that wrinkle is FriendFeed, an RSS / content sharing service that’s now owned by Facebook. Many bloggers who’ve been around for a while have built large followings on FriendFeed, often with thousands or tens of thousands of followers in some cases.

If you:

Have a large following at FriendFeed, and
FriendFeed was following your FeedBurner feed, and
You didn’t change it to look at your blog’s source feed (redirecting to FeedBlitz) as part of the migration,

Then:

Those followers either don’t appear in your FeedBlitz metrics at all, or they suddenly “disappear” when you delete your FeedBurner feed and the redirection from FeedBurner stops working after 15 days. Why? Because FriendFeed is looking at the old FeedBurner URL. The fix is simple – you have to change where FriendFeed checks for updates. Effectively what you do is resubscribe all your FriendFeed followers in one fell swoop. If you don’t do it, they won’t get your updates, and they don’t get counted.

So if your blog is well-established and you have a FriendFeed account, make sure all those readers get counted properly! Log in, go to your services, and refresh the bog service. The refresh should pick up the correct feed and the results appear in the following day’s RSS metrics. If that doesn’t work, remove then re-add the blog, and all will be well: The followers re-appear.

If you use other similar publisher-managed services – Triberr comes to mind here – check them out too. Make sure you have them looking at your blog’s current RSS feed.

Generally speaking, when you switch over, it’s a good idea to see what services are delivering your readership in FeedBurner via their reports. If there’s a service there, like FriendFeed, that you control, make sure you update it with your bog’s correct feed URL on your own domain – it helps avoid scary drops in metrics! Meanwhile, we’ve upgraded the Migration Guide to highlight this need and FriendFeed specifically.

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