This post is about getting people to your website so they see the whole post. I’m writing it to discuss a problem with automatically linking my WordPress post to my Facebook account, including what I’m doing to counter this.
There! If you are a person who wants to get more visitors to your website, does that entice you to click the link to see the rest?
I’ve often wondered in recent times, if friends on Facebook are following the link to read the whole blogpost or if they feel they have read enough in the first paragraph or so that the Facebook/Wordpress algorithm squashes together on my Facebook page.
I suspect it is the latter. In fact yesterday’s post revealed the truth of it for at least one of my friends. I discovered this when their comment pertained to only the excerpt (which didn’t show where I took the reader in the rest of the post).
The power of the first paragraph is interesting. It draws the reader into a piece of writing, leading them to the next thought, which leads to the one after. There may be a different angle to the overall piece, but if the reader can only see the first paragraph they will use the limited clues they have to discern the meaning of the whole thing.
As my friend pointed out, people are often time-poor, maybe sneaking … er … taking a quick look at Facebook before taking children to school or heading off to work. Maybe they are indulging guiltily and should be working (or sleeping)!
Whatever the reason, they are clearly not having the reading experience I designed when I drafted the post. Along with that, they are not getting the opportunity to ponder, apply or reply to any useful info or ideas within my post.
So how can I overcome this difficulty? The excerpt is not selected by me; it’s automatic. It contains the first however-many words (or characters), followed by brackets in which you can find out how many words remain in the post on my website.
I could manually post the content on Facebook- but that wouldn’t be good use of my time. So maybe some clever writing will work. I’ll keep thinking about it and try a few things. I’m open to suggestions!
Clearly I should put the important stuff right at the beginning, as I would when writing for a newspaper. Then when people scan their feed and feel they have gleaned enough information from what’s on the page, they will have the important part.
But what if there’s more? Hahaha! Maybe I should figure out how many characters are in an excerpt and make sure the last 23 read, “But wait! There’s more!”
If you are reading this part, you either found the post on my website to start with – or you did click the link to read the whole post – and I didn’t reward you with pictures to break up the text, either! Sorry about that, but what image goes with these words?
If you did click the link from Facebook, please let me know in the comments here or on Facebook. Thanks – and thank for reading!