An Example...
Personally, I didn't need another reason to utilize my RSS reader. It is a very important tool in how I manage my reading, education, and maintain my listening posts.
But the latest reason you should be using an RSS reader?
You can now subscribe to the RSS feed on Facebook Fan pages. So, yeah, all those pages you've liked? You can now more easily keep an eye on the actual pages you care about.
All you have to do is click on the Subscribe Via RSS button on the left sidebar on a Facebook Fan page. You then will be prompted to put the feed into the RSS reader of your choice.
Probably like you, I "like" too many pages, and it is virtually impossible to follow any of them. But now? I can go to the few pages I want to monitor, subscribe to the feed, and see what content they are publishing on those pages, such as for my client's pages, or that of a prospect...
This action just made Facebook more important to me...
Here is a quick reminder of a few other important uses of your RSS reader:
1. An obvious way to manage all the blogs you follow. Your RSS reader aggregates all that blog content into one place. You can now much more easily follow hundreds of blogs at any given time. You can quickly glance at post content to determine if it worth a deeper read, and you are notified when a blog publishes new content. Secret: this is how you monitor hundreds of blogs. Most don't update but a few times a month...
2. Twitter Search. Monitoring key word searches on Twitter, such as your name, your company, your target market is the best way to keep an eye on what people are saying about you. When you set up a Twitter Search query, you can have the results fed into your RSS reader. Having all this content go to one place makes it easier to monitor.
3. LinkedIn Status. You can have the status updates of all your LinkedIn connections fed into your RSS reader. This is a great way to view a daily snapshot of what your friends and business connections on LinkedIn are doing, saying, and connecting with, again, all in one place.
4. Google Alerts. Most of us are familiar with using Google Alerts to send web mentions of you and your company. But most people have those results sent to them via email. I did too at one point, until it clogged up my inbox. You can have those query results fed into your RSS reader.
5. News. Honestly, this is how I get my news. I subscribe to the RSS feed of the news sources I want, and have those results fed into my RSS reader. Thus, all my news is gathered in one place. My RSS reader enables me to quickly scan the headlines, and select a specific news article if it interests me...
What others ways do you use your RSS reader?
And yes, using those six methods as I do, I get a TON of content fed into my reader every day. But, I promise, you will get the hang of how to move and sort quickly through all that content and find those valuable nuggets of information that are worth your time. Having all that content sent to my RSS reader is an amazing time saver for me, yet keeps me easily plugged in to all the content my network produces on a daily basis.