Feed Flares - Choosing The Right Feed Flare For Your Blog

Feedburner offers you a unique free service called Feed Flare which lets you give more options to your readers to interact with your content via various social networks. But many a times the service is not used the right way as bloggers tend to add on every available option, thinking it’s a good thing.

Flare it right

First of all - putting up every possible Feed Flare not only takes up too much space on your post but it also ends up looking icky, and at times even confusing to a person.

If you use WordPress you should install the Share This plugin available on alexking.org, it makes life much simpler. You can still add the most important Feed Flares, as I have done on my blog. But just the most important - the kind that can drive traffic to you.

This isn’t necessarily to say that it will give your blog a social boost, as ultimately it depends on the user to make the extra effort to submit or save your content. For that to happen you need to have content worth the extra effort on their part. But I’ve found on my own blog that if I have less options the chances of my content going social are higher.

Picking The Right Flare

One important point to consider is whether the type of content you create belongs on the social site you have a Feed Flare for. As an example, a Fashion blogs content would probably not get popular with the crowd over at digg and reddit. So having the flares for those sites will not do you much good, plus it takes up space.

Instead try the del.icio.us, add to technorati favorites and email this flare - those should work better. If someone wants to really submit your content to any other site, trust me they’ll put in the extra effort.

The same goes for any other kind of blog.

When choosing which flare to show, ask yourself -

• Would I put my own content on this social/bookmarking site? and
• Does my content fit the type of crowd that visits the site?

If you answer No to any one then don’t add that particular flare.

Taking myself as an example, I had the “Discuss on Newsvine” flare, to date not one reader has clicked on that flare. I have now substituted it with the “Stumble it” flare - which I think should probably work better.

Feed Flares also show up in RSS readers, so you can have different Feed Flares to show up on your blog and your RSS feed.

Also read, how to style your Feed Flare with CSS.

Subscribe to my full RSS feed.

Recommended Reading

• Styling FeedFlare With CSS
• Feedburner Flare Comment Counts - Glitch Or Gaming?
• Which Web Design Company? - Rate and Review at WWDC
• Customize RSS Feeds in Your WordPress Dashboard