Rafael,
Posting to the Activity Log is all an action does by default. From there, Facebook automatically decides how it will display in different views for that user and their friends. There's the Ticker, the user's Timeline, and the Feed that friends.. in all of those places the action can show up, but it depends on a variety of different social factors, relationship to the viewer, and lots of other things as to whether it will display.
The 'automatic' actions, like read, watch, and listen were recently changed by Facebook to not automatically show in the Timeline. Since they aren't triggered directly by the user, Facebook generally shows them in 'temporary' channels, like the ticker and news feed instead of a permanent post on the Timeline (which can get cluttered with a lot of actions).
Hope that helps explain,
Alex