Evolution of the pages associated with the Empoprise-BI business blog

Ever since I started the Empoprises series of blogs, I have always thought about creating a conversation area, separate from each blog itself but somehow complimenting the blog in question.

My first foray into this was to use FriendFeed to create pages that were associated with the blogs. For the Empoprise-BI business blog, the associated FriendFeed page is at http://friendfeed.com/empoprise-bi. Since FriendFeed is an aggregation service, I attached various feeds to the page - not only the Empoprise-BI business blog itself, but also other business-related feeds that I thought would complement the blog content. All of these feed into the Empoprise-BI FriendFeed page automatically, requiring no effort on my part.

And perhaps that was the problem. With everything on auto-pilot, I wasn't necessarily motivated to manually add content to the page. I have to confess that I don't even visit the page much any more. I just looked at the four subscribers to the page, and I don't know that I've ever interacted with any of them.

Facebook appeared to be a more promising avenue, especially since there are many more people on Facebook than on FriendFeed. So I created the https://www.facebook.com/pages/Empoprise-BI/98783891478 page. Facebook does not allow an unlimited number of feeds per page, and perhaps that's a good thing. The only thing feeding automatically is the blog itself, both via a native Facebook feed and via NetworkedBlogs. And the subscriber, Greg Guitarbuster, is someone with whom I DO interact.

This Facebook page is clearly a promising avenue for interaction with blog readers, but I just need to commit to it more.

Which brings us to the most recent page associated with the blog - the Google+ page. The full stream is at https://plus.google.com/b/109749273915145133943/; this includes the feeds of the friends of the page. The items that I specifically posted to the Empoprise-BI page are at https://plus.google.com/b/109749273915145133943/109749273915145133943/posts.
At present, all of the content is entered manually - although if Google ever allows feeds to automatically populate business pages, I'll probably add the feed for the blog.

I'm interacting more with this page as of late, probably because of the "shiny new toy" syndrome (Facebook business pages were only introduced over the last few days). I can't definitively say that the Facebook page or the Google+ page is better - as far as I'm concerned, they both have possibilities - especially since some Facebook users will never join Google+, and some Google+ users will never join Facebook.

Of course, there are other ways to interact with the blog. The easiest way to do so is via the Disqus-provided comment functionality.

And Is hould remind you that if you just want to consume content, but don't necessarily want to interact, you don't necessarily have to come to the blog itself. You can subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/empoprise-bi in your favorite feed reader or in your browser itself.