KeesWickham846

Many businesses periodically send newsletters by postal mail to keep subscribers current on their affairs or industry-related news, for the purpose of maintaining a loyal customer base to whom they can market additional products or services. With pervasive use of the internet for information dissemination, and with RSS News Feed gaining momentum as a powerful online communication tool, one needs to ask whether businesses are now better served by publishing news feeds in lieu of newsletters.

There are obvious convenience factors that favor publishing news feeds over newsletters: No newsletter design delays or expenses, no printing delays, no printing costs, no postage costs, no mailing lists. But are news feeds more effective than newsletters in delivering the message? And if so, can anyone with essentially no knowledge of news feeds and with computer skills limited to sending email and browsing the internet actually publish a news feed on their own?

Putting aside the obvious advantages of Newsreader listed above, an important question to ask when evaluating effectiveness of the newsletter versus the news feed is whether the information is time-sensitive. If the business is publishing information pertaining to such topics as the stock market, real estate, investments, weather, new products or services, competitive analyses, product catalogs and prices (and you can probably add more to this list), the effectiveness of the newsletter dramatically diminishes as the delay between the "event" and the delivery of the information about the event increases. If a newsletter is published every three months, on average the information is six weeks old! And it's not just that the information arrives too late to be important to the recipient, but also because recipients will come to know the newsletter is irrelevant to their affairs and tune out. Unfortunately, that means it will be seen as junk mail and tossed into the trash without opening. Why would I care about an investment opportunity if, by the time I receive that advice, it's too late to act on it? (At my post office, a recycle bin is provided in the lobby so that you can conveniently toss away your junk mail without even taking it home.)

Recognizing this time-sensitivity problem, businesses have been depending more and more on email broadcasting to a subscription list. You've seen the come-on -- "Sign up for our email list". To many, this is viewed as volunteering to receive spam. Even when one does reluctantly submit their email address to those hopefully-private lists, spam filters will often trash that email, and for the email that does get through (and we all know how effective spammers have become), the email from the legitimate businesses usually gets lost amidst all that spam. So what does it matter if the business has avoided the development, distribution, and delay problems associated with newsletters by using email, if in the end the message never gets to welcoming ears.

News feeds effectively overcome the shortfalls of newsletters and email broadcasts. With news feeds, nothing is ever printed or emailed, and the news feed is instantly available online. Recipients can volunteer to receive the information without having it "pushed" at them, so there is no sense of spamming associated with news feeds. The audience for the information can receive that information at their convenience and can receive alerts or "signals" whenever new information is published. For example, if you were interested in listening in on investment advice from an advisor who publishes a news feed, you could subscribe to that news feed - without giving your email address away - and whenever new information is published, you could receive a signal and operate on that information in real time. Imagine ... literally within seconds after the advice is published, you could read and act upon that new information.

If your intention is to spam - in other words, to send unsolicited information to others with the intent of gaining some advantage - than news feeds are not for you. Your targets will simply not tune in to Social Media Newsreader that don't interest them! Spammers are stuck with email and mass mailings with the hope that recipients will accidentally open the spam and get teased into the proposition by the seduction of the message.

But what about the question of publishing news feeds? Is it easy, or does it require some special computer skills? Do you need to hire or pay someone to do your news feed for you?

The good news is that RSS News Feeds can be incredibly simple to publish if you select the right publishing tool. Numerous tools are "out there" (some much simpler than others!) for publishing news feeds; some are online services such as Enfeedia, some are programs you download. Some are free, some are not. For maximum ease, choose a news feed publishing tool you use by filling in a simple form so that you need not learn any technical skills to take advantage of the power of news feeds; it can be as simple as writing email.