Ways To Use RSS Feeds To Power Your Twitter Account
Finding the time and resources to keep Twitter updated can often be a challenge for the average business owner. So I'm always on the look out for tools that can help with the process and take away a lot of the grunt work.
One way to do this is through the use of RSS or content feeds. RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication'. An RSS feed is basically a file containing syndicated
content that's readable by software.
For example, most blogs have RSS feeds automatically built in (yourblog.com/feed if it's on Wordpress), along with a lot of other sites such as YouTube and SlideShare.
This can make the use of RSS very useful in keeping your Twitter account updated with relevant content, while leaving you free to make other updates, engage with your followers, and so on.
So how can you use RSS feeds to help power your Twitter account? Here are 3 different ways to approach it.
1. IFTTT
IFTTT stands for 'If This Then That', and allows you to set up automation tasks consisting of triggers that automate certain follow-on actions.
One such automation task can be set up using an RSS feed as a trigger. Each time the feed is updated (eg. you publish a new post), you can tell it to post a tweet.
However, as it's a fairly generic tool for a ton of different tasks - and very useful in some circumstances - the control you get over the actual tweet that's posted is fairly minimal.
2. TwitterFeed
TwitterFeed is an online application specifically designed to feed your Twitter account with content from one or more RSS feeds.
Again you enter the RSS feed in question, and then each time the feed is updated, it Tweets an update for you. But you get more control over what's actually posted.
For example, it provides some filtering capability, so it will only post items containing certain key words for example, like 'apple'.
But you can't filter based on keyword phrases (eg. 'apple tree'), which are often more useful from a business perspective.
It allows you to add some text to put before each Tweet, and also afterwards. For example, you might want to add '[Blog Update]' before each Tweet relating to your blog content.
While a useful tool in some circumstances, it is fairly limited though in that:
- You can't state how long each Tweet should be. For example, it's often useful to have Tweets under 100 characters to encourage retweeting, and thereby get higher visibility for your content.
- Content is only tweeted out once. For businesses, it's often useful to tweet multiple times. That may include repeating a tweet two or three times to catch people in different time zones, or say sending out multiple different Tweets based on the same content over the course of a few weeks or months.
- You can't use different hashtags for the same feed. You might add a hashtag using their 'post suffix' facility - but it would always be the same one, and might not be the best one for each piece of content.
3. vWriter.com
Again, this tool allows you to feed your Twitter account with content from RSS feeds, but it has a number of additional features that make it more valuable for business purposes.
For example, you can opt to have real writers create your Tweets based on the original content. This can make your account look more personal and engaging, and at much lower cost than if you employed someone to take care of it for you.
This can also be useful in curating content from a number of sources, and thereby attracting more followers to you, without your Twitter account looking robotic and automated.
Some of the other things you can do include the following:
- Have more than one Tweet created from the original content, and then schedule them out as you wish. So you could for example have multiple different Tweets going out over a few weeks from a single post.
- Specify the length of each Tweet - this can help with optimizing retweets for example.
- Provide a time window for the Tweets to be published. This allows you to publish Tweets at the optimal time for your business, such as when your audience is generally more active and engaged.
And more besides.
The downside is that vWriter.com is a paid tool (offering other types of content creation too), so is more suitable for businesses willing to invest a small amount for improved functionality.
On the other hand, IFTTT and TwitterFeed are free, but naturally more limited in what they can do for your business.
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