Twitter as an RSS Reader? Publish Your Newest Post Links to Your Twitter Account

For the last six or eight months, a friend of mine has told me that she uses Twitter as her RSS feed. She follows everyone she's interested in and follows the links they provide via Twitter (whether to personal or news blogs). She doesn't use any other aggregator. Her experience made me stop and think: do all bloggers think to link their blogs to their Twitter account? Depending on where you are in your social media journey, this may be a new idea for you. You may not be aware of the tools available to help you link your accounts so readers, no matter where they are, can find you.

Twitterfeed

By associating your blog's RSS with your Twitterfeed account, any time you publish a new article on your blog, the URL is shortened via bit.ly and fed directly to Twitter via your Twitter account (you can also feed it to Facebook). In addition, the confirmation email I received said, "If you use Feedburner and have authorized their awareness api then you can also see those stats on your dashboard, making it easy to compare your traditional RSS distribution with Twitterfeed's social distribution." If you take advantage of that feature, you could find some interesting correlations. To set up a Twitterfeed account:

Go to Twitterfeed.com.
Complete the sign-up form with an email address and password.
Choose whether you'd like your feed to be sent to Twitter or Facebook.
Connect with the appropriate account by clicking either the Authenticate Twitter (to send your feed to Twitter) or Connect with Facebook (to send your feed to Facebook) button.
Type in the name of the feed you want to send out.
Type in the URL of the feed you want to send out.
Click Update Feed.

If you like, you can use the advanced settings to set

update frequency (every 30 minutes, every hour, on up to every day)
whether to include the title and/or post description
which service to use to shorten your links (e.g., bit.ly, SnipURL, TinyURL, etc.)
post prefixes and suffixes

TypePad

TypePad has recently unveiled some new feature to its software. One of those features allows you to share your newest posts with Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed as they are published. To use this feature, though, you'll need to link your TypePad account with those third-party social media tools. Just go to Settings > Sharing and choose which accounts you want to share your TypePad posts with. Right now you can only share your posts with Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed. Once you've established a connection between your TypePad account and your other social media accounts, follow these instructions for sharing your posts with Twitter (and/or Facebook and FriendFeed):

Write your post as usual.
Check the box next to Twitter (and/or Facebook and FriendFeed) under Share This Post in the right sidebar of the New Post page.
Save/publish your post as usual. When the post is published, TypePad will send the permalink of the article (shortend via bit.ly) to the accounts you checked.

Do it yourself

You may not want to tweet everything you post. Many people choose to tweet only posts by others or posts they've written themselves only if it relates to a specific, current conversation. In those cases, you can simply paste the permalink into your tweet and Twitter will automatically shorten the link via bit.ly.

One more tip

You've probably noticed that the tools I've recommended all use bit.ly to shorten your URLs. It's by far the most popular URL-shortener and I encourage you to try it out. The feature that makes bit.ly so popular, I think, is that it allows you to set up an account with them and track how many click-throughs your bit.ly links receive. If you're tracking that information, you can really get a good idea of which social media communities are using your information consistently. You can also track which topics are more popular than others. When it comes to data tracking, the possibilities are endless. Bit.ly is just one more tool for your arsenal.

Comments

So There Is a Difference

I had no idea why the bit.ly feature was so popular. I thought it was the same as tinyurl.com and now know it is totally not.

I hesitate to sign up for these bells and whistles because I like to blog w/out the pressure. Do you feel the same?

http://www.thecluelesscrafter.com/

Submitted by cluelesscrafter on Fri, 10/23/2009 - 08:21

Pressure

I do like to blog without pressure. However, I do use Twitterfeed to update my Twitter account when I post an article. I don't post every day so I don't feel like my links are inundatating anyone. I also appreciate it when others include a link to their or another's post. More and more Twitter is being used as an RSS feed.

As for bells & whistles, it's hard to say. My opinion is that you should only use the tools that work within your goals. I don't do every social media trick out there, but I do like to pass on the info in case it's a tool someone else can use.

Melanie Nelson
Contributing Editor at BlogHer.com (Web/Tech)
Owner, Blogging Basics 101
Co-author, TypePad for Dummies (due in stores Feb. 2010)

Submitted by Melanie Nelson on Fri, 10/23/2009 - 10:20

I had no clue what bit.ly

I had no clue what bit.ly was either. I see it very often on Twitter, but I have seen links I posted automatically appear as bit.ly links on my Twitter profile (I think it only happened once though). So I fugured it must just happen automatically for everyone...I'm still clueless for the most part about all this new stuff. Even though I once considered myself very internet savvy. LOL.

I always post links to my Twitter when I have new blog posts though. I don't know many of my hits come from Twitter, but I figure it's still a worthwhile step.

-Dominique Ambassador for Christ.Wife.Mother.Woman.Writer. I blog at Searching for Freelance Success.

Submitted by MommyWriter on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 17:53

Hootsuite

I've been using Hootsuite to manage my Twitter activities and really like their range of features. They have their own URL shortener which provides stats on clickthroughs. You can also add your RSS feed to automatically Tweet when you have new blog posts (like Twitterfeed), and you can also create groups (to organize the people you follow), schedule Tweets for the future and more. If you have multiple Twitter accounts, you could manage them all in the same Hootsuite account. I tried using Tweetdeck which has some of these features but switched to Hootsuite since I found their interface easier on the eyes.

I still use Google Reader for my RSS feeds because there's too much noise on Twitter and in Google Reader I can see the content without having to click through as you would on Twitter, so I can scan and determine if it's something I want to read fully. For me it's more time-efficient than using Twitter as an RSS reader.

Submitted by webtrainingwheels on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 08:44

I've been using Twitterfeed

I've been using Twitterfeed for quite some time. I do believe it helps others keep up and I know I've been a more avid reader of others' blogs because of updates being posted via Twitter, too. It doesn't surprise me that one could use Twitter as their "feed reader".

Didn't Twitter used to use TinyURL? I'm pretty sure Bit.ly popped up one day and I was like "Hmm, that's different".

Submitted by anaesthetic on Wed, 11/04/2009 - 00:12

RSS-to-Twitter & Facebook

What we are finding with our publishers at Dlvr.it, is they treat Twitter and Facebook differently. On twitter they are creating several vertical accounts. For example, they create one for sports, business, technology or sports Bruins, sports football. Secondly, they look at Twitter more like they would an RSS aggregator - whatever is in the feed post it there. However, Facebook is different. They turn down the volume of content that goes into Facebook. Two different tactics on two very different social media sites.

Submitted by bflitter on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 14:17