Every post is an experiment
I’m experimenting a little with my personal blog. The TL;DR: is that:
- I’m adding social media posts to my blog, where they’ll be auto-posted on a few social media sites.
- Normal posts (longer form essays like this one) will be auto-posted to the socials as well.
- Normal posts will trigger emailed notifications to those who’ve signed up, social media posts will not.
If you’re curious about the why, and perhaps even the how, keep reading.
The risks of someone else’s platform
I’ve written about this before, but posting on social media, or for that matter, any platform you don’t actually own yourself, comes with risk. In exchange for that thing called “possible exposure”, when you post on someone else’s platform, you risk:
- Having the account get hacked, and losing access forever. It happens more often than you would think.
- Having the account disabled because you stepped over some fuzzy imaginary line that also keeps moving.
- Having the account disabled because you piss off enough people that then claim you stepped over that fuzzy line even though you did not.
- Having the platform taken over by … well, by someone you no longer want to support.
- Having the platform disappear completely. Think MySpace in the past, and the potential for TikTok in the future.
Thus, in the purists view, publish only on platforms you control yourself.
Like your personal blog. On your own domain. (That you also back up periodically. 
)
The problem, of course, is that if you post only on your own platform, it’s likely you’ll never get noticed. If “exposure” and getting your message out to others is important to you, perhaps even part of a larger strategy, your own platform is an incomplete solution.
Publish once, syndicate everywhere
The model I’ve long adopted for my content — both here, and in my other efforts — is to publish once, on a platform I own and control, and then “syndicate” to a bunch of other places. For example, I’d post an article on askleo.com, but then sprinkle links to that article around social media sites, as well as send it out in different forms to those who’ve subscribed to my newsletter or notifications. (And in true “syndication” form, there are also RSS feeds.)
Social media sites do not like this. Links take people away from their site. Depending on the aggressiveness of the site, it’s not uncommon for those link posts to not be seen by many. That’s one reason I push newsletter subscriptions for those who would truly like to see my content more consistently. But publishing my full content on sites like Facebook (perhaps the most egregious example) isn’t happening. That’s where I draw the line.
So, depending on which of my publications you’re looking at, it breaks down like this:
- Items are published on a website I own and control.
- Newsletters of various forms get sent to those who’ve subscribed.
- Notifications and links get sent to assorted social media sites like
Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, Mastodon, Threads, and whatever else might make sense based on my whims at the time. (Facebook posts cannot be automated, which is perhaps both a good or bad thing, but it’s definitely an inconvenience for me. I may do some, but it’ll always have to be manual, which means it won’t be all.)
But it all starts with “published on a website I own”.
Except.
Short-form content
I will occasionally post short-form content. By that I mean one-liners, humor, the occasional meme, or anything that doesn’t rise to the level of “an article”.
I’ve been giving those to the social media platforms for free.
The experiment is not to do that, or at least not do it as much.
Following the lead of other bloggers I’ve encountered, I’ll be posting those short-form items here on my personal blog first. Then links (or something) will get pushed out to the social media platforms that might be appropriate. See “whims” above.
However, I don’t want to piss off the people who’ve signed up for new content notifications on this blog with the expectation they’d be getting articles, essays, and think-pieces. They didn’t sign up for potentially more frequent short-form and perhaps silly content. So Social Media Posts have their own category here, and will not go out via email.
But if you visit the site, you’ll see ’em all.
Mechanics
Since I know some people will be interested.
I have two custom RSS feeds generated for this blog.
- leo.notenboom.org/aweber – As the name implies (aweber is my newsletter sending service), this is designed to contain only those articles for which new article notification emails are to be sent to subscribers. No short-form here. Aweber.com checks this and sends the email notification when something new shows up.
- leo.notenboom.org/socialmedia – This feed contains everything — articles and short-form — intended to be posted to social media. I use Publer.io to monitor this feed, and post to a selection of social media sites when something new shows up.
All I have to do is remember to categorize properly when I post. Apologies in advance for those times when I forget.
On taking myself too seriously
It’s very possible I’m over valuing my social media posts. Oh well.
As I said, this is an experiment. Maybe it’ll pay off, maybe it won’t. If nothing else I’ll no longer have to go searching for that “I know I posted something about something, somewhere, but now I can’t find it”. It’ll (mostly) all be here.
And maybe when Facebook shuts down (ha!), or I get booted from Threads, or who-knows-what, I’ll be glad to have it all here. Under my control.