Why Bloggers Should Share Their Posts on Their Personal Facebook Pages

There is a trend lately among bloggers to share their blog posts on writer pages for fans rather than in their personal news feeds. This means that friends who want to follow their personal updates and their blog posts need to friend them AND subscribe to their pages.

Here are three reasons why this is bad for most bloggers along with a hefty caveat:

Assumptions about Blog Content

The fear among many bloggers is that their friends and family will get tired of blog posts being pushed in front of them. Perhaps there are ways a blogger could do this poorly, but this kind of thinking assumes that sharing your own writing is somehow wrong.

While pushy blog content or a pushy approach to sharing blog content would be a turn off, I’d like to ask you, “Who do you write for?” There’s probably a good chance that many of your friends and family would benefit by reading your blog. If not, then you may want to rethink your blog rather than changing your sharing plans.

If your blog is sharing something valuable, then you shouldn’t feel bad about sharing it. When your blog is an extension of who you are and what you’re interested in, it belongs on your personal Facebook news feed.

Assumptions about Friends

I tend to assume that my friends and family don’t read my blog, but every month I hear from someone else who has been quietly reading my blog posts or the articles I write for other sites and share on Facebook. While some friends may choose to hide my updates, enough of them have been quietly following my blog through Facebook that I have no intention of separating my blog from my personal Facebook updates any time soon.

I think it’s more helpful to set up a writing page for yourself if you want to keep your professional contacts away from your personal life rather than sparing your friends and family from your blog.

I use my Facebook writers page to share writing industry news and my blog posts. My personal Facebook page is a mix of my personal updates and blog posts.

How We Manage News Feeds

While this move of blog posts away from personal walls to fan pages is rooted in a desire to be considerate to friends and family, I would like to suggest that this separation causes more problems than it solves. If I want to keep in touch with a friend and follow his/her writing, I don’t like the idea of having to subscribe and friend this person so that I’m stuck following both of his/her feeds.

I like the idea of just having one feed for one person. I’ve got hundreds of friends to sift through, and it seems like more of a liability than an advantage.

Another huge wild card that I can’t speak to directly is how Facebook manages what shows up in my news feed. I’ve heard that pages aren’t always prioritized, and I’ve had too many friends write these posts explaining how I can make their fan pages a priority in my news feed. All of this seems far more complicated and annoying than these friends simply sharing their blog posts every day in their personal feeds.

The Caveat about Blog Content

The one exception to this would be if your blog is firmly planted in a narrow niche that your friends would never want to read about. For example, if you blog about website coding, don’t share your blog posts with friends and family.

There may also be some bloggers who would rather not let friends and family know about their writing. They may even use a pseudonym so that no one can discover what they’re writing about.

An Apology

I’m sorry that I’ve become that bossy blogger telling people what to do about social media and their blogs. However, I think the core issue here is one of self-esteem and personal assessment for bloggers.

Far too many bloggers undervalue their writing.

They just assume that sharing their posts with friends and family is annoying or burdensome to them. I think it’s time for bloggers to embrace their value and to boldly share their work with everyone who needs to read it.

If you blog, it’s your job to writing something valuable and to then share it with readers. If you aren’t willing to share it, then you’ve either failed to create something good or you’ve convinced yourself of a lie about the worth of your hard work.