I am a big proponent of facebook. I use it all the time for both business and personal reasons. I maintain several different blogs in addition to my Active Rain blog, including a photoblog on The Wordless Blog called Rich's Pics, a blog entitled Knoxville Local Expert devoted entirely to my local area on Neighborhood Expert Online, a blog dealing with "big picture" economics on Rich Talks Real Estate, and I am a contributor to Positive Real estate Professionals and Athletic Alley. With this type of commitment to the different websites/blogsites it is important that I maximize the productive benefit of my efforts.

To this end I have been using the tool or button. Do not misunderstand, I think this is a great tool for sharing your posts across many different platforms. I have been using this as opposed to an RSS feed because not everything I write I want fed to every network or platform I belong to. The people who come to view one of my photo posts like Under The Sea! might not have any interest in my profile of The Tomato Head. For this reason I selectively share some but not all posts. So back to the tool.

I noticed something interesting the other day when I had used this tool to post to my wall. The way that Facebook has integrated the share this tool makes it appear that when your article, posted on your Facebook wall using the share this tool, is clicked the visitor is taken to you to your actual blog or the site where the article actually appears; in reality this is not the case. As you can see from the four images below there is a definite and important difference. The first two images utilized the share this tool and the second two images used a tool that was recently integrated into The Wordless Blog and The Neighborhood Expert Online platforms.

This link actually opens up as a facebook page and though it appears to go to your actual blog where the article is posted, you can see from the address in the browser window that this is not the case.

In this direct link that I posted on Facebook using the new integrated tool, when the reader clicks on the link they go to my post's actual location. If they choose to comment on the post, they actually comment on the post and not on my Facebook wall. This important difference is a big deal because a visitor to my facebook page who is interested in the article and clicks on it becomes a visitor and is counted in the site's statistics, otherwise you stats might be kept artificially low. Another very important thing is that when a visitor comments on the post from the Facebook page it goes on your wall whereas a comment on the post's actual location goes into the comment section of that post.

I am writing this post because I know a lot of people use the share this tool and in many applications it is a very good tool. I in fact intend to continue using it for many applications other than Facebook. I think that having an option in Active Rain similar to the Twitter application would be a very beneficial tool for the Active Rain members to be able to utilize. It would be a benefit to both Active Rain as well as the members of Active Rain.