- Add Your RSS Feed to Your Twitter Account - Tei MG
If you have a blog and a Twitter account, you're probably already sharing new blog posts with your Twitter followers. However, unless you've found a way to do it automatically the odds are good that you're sick of doing it by hand for each new post.
TwitterFeed and FeedBurner's Socialize are free services that will let bloggers use the blog's RSS feed to automate this process. Each service will generate a new tweet for each post that includes the post title and a shortened link to the post itself.
How to Grab Your RSS Feed Information
Both TwitterFeed and FeedBurner Socialize will require entering the URL for your RSS feed before they can do anything. If you're not sure what your feed address is, visit your blog's home page and look for the RSS icon (a white dot with two white arcs emanating from it, usually on a field of orange). To get the feed address, click on this icon. The address that appears in your browser's address bar is usually what you need.
The Tips Supremo Blog suggests two other methods, including searching your blog's source code for 'type="application/rss+xml"'. This text will be embedded in an html link tag that begins with '<' and ends with '>'. Your feed address will be located between the quotation marks that follow "href=".
Use TwitterFeed to Syndicate Blog Posts Through Your Twitter Account
TwitterFeed is a popular and free web service that enables bloggers to distribute content from RSS feeds to a number of publishing services, including Twitter and Facebook. TwitterFeed will check the feed at selected intervals (every 30 minutes, every hour, every 2 hours, etc.) for updates and convert 1 to 5 of them into tweets that go out to followers.
In his tutorial on using TwitterFeed, Matthew Tommasi explains how to send RSS to Twitter.
- Create an account by visiting TwitterFeed.com, clicking on "sign up," and following the directions. You'll need only an e-mail address and a password to use with TwitterFeed.
- Once you've confirmed your e-mail address, sign in and click on "Create New Feed."
- You'll be asked to create a name for the feed and enter the feed URL. This is also when you can select checking intervals and number of updates to distribute. You can do that now by clicking "Advanced Settings" or come back to it later. Click the continue button at the bottom.You'll be taken to the Twitter site and asked for your login information to confirm that the account is yours.
- Click "Create Service" and you're done.
Use Google's FeedBurner to Automatically Publish RSS Content to a Twitter Account
If you're already using Google's free FeedBurner service to manage a blog's RSS feed, you can also use it to automatically distribute content through Twitter to your followers.
A My Digital Life tutorial outlines how to configure an existing FeedBurner feed for broadcasting through Twitter:
- After signing up for FeedBurner and adding the feed you want to send to Twitter, click on the name of the feed from your dashboard.
- Click on the "Publicize" tab from across the top and then the "Socialize" link from the sidebar along the left side of the page.
- Click on "Add a Twitter account." You'll be taken to the Twitter site and asked for your login information to confirm that the account is yours.
- There are a number of options for selecting items and formatting tweets. Read carefully and enter your choices.
- Hit the "Activate" button at the bottom of this page.
Automation Tools Have Their Limits
While these and similar tools will save time, they shouldn't be relied upon as the only method of getting your blog's content into the Twitterverse. With special posts you may want to take some extra time to craft more enticing tweets, perhaps with quotations or hashtags. Think of automation tools as things that let you better devote your time to the things that are better handled by humans.
Aaron Jacklin - Aaron Jacklin is an Ontario-based writer. He majored in criminal justice and public policy at the University of Guelph, studied journalism ...
