Networked Blogs, the almost official blog directory & syndication application on Facebook, offers users the ability to subscribe to, rate, comment and share blogs with their friends. I would advise any blogger to add their blog to the directory, but I would not suggest that you funnel all of your Facebook friends to it. While Networked Blogs offers some nice features and indexation in a fairly high-traffic blog search engine (2 million visitors / month with close to 1 million users), the application is too many degrees removed from both your blog and Facebook.

In order for your Facebook friends to follow your blog, they must first sign up for the app. Furthermore, if and when someone does follow your blog via Networked Blogs, that is usually where it ends. The app does not publish to subscribers news feeds and does not serve to keep subscribers regularly engaged with your content. Finally, Networked Blogs appends a dreadful toolbar to outbound links which does enable sharing… but if my blog enables content sharing anyway, why would I want that? It might even prevent me from getting a backlink or trackback. So while I recommend participating in the application, I find Networked Blogs a semi-dismal blog syndication/subscription choice. If you are going to participate, you should aim for a top 50 spot per tag – you are allowed up to 3 keyword tags – and at minimum 20 followers in order to be searchable on Facebook.

Instead, I recommend that you focus Facebook efforts on a Facebook Page for these 3 reasons:

1. Your Page is searchable in the Facebook Pages directory, which is accessible to all Facebook users.
2. Your friends can easily subscribe to your Facebook Page; no additional permissions requested.
3. Facebook Page updates appear in Fan’s news feeds, keeping subscribers engaged.

I should mention that the Networked Blogs application will broadcast to a Facebook Page, but I cannot speak to it’s effectiveness based on personal experience.