Tag Archives for " twitterfeed "

31 A Twitter Sharing Time Saving Tip

One of the tactics I enjoy using on twitter is to bookmark blog posts and web sites that I think are amazing and share them with my followers. This is one part of my overall twitter posting strategy. (Having a strategy for twitter and employing tactics to meet objectives kind of sounds like how you would approach any aspect of your marketing doesn’t it?)

While I firmly believe this is worth the time it takes to hand select these links, I’m all for finding tools that help me do these kinds of things more easily. There’s a twitter based tool, called twitterfeed, that’s been around for a while that essentially allows you to automatically publish any RSS feed to twitter. Now, it’s easy for me to imagine some silly and spammy uses for this. Blindly autoposting a bunch of blog feeds into twitter doesn’t smack me as a very good tactic, but people do it all the time. That’s not what I’m suggesting here at all.

There are lots of ways to create RSS content, including ways that allow you to hand curate and bookmark content that goes into a feed.

I use Google Reader to subscribe to and read lots of blogs. One feature built into this reader is the ability to “share” posts I find and mark them for others to see. I can make my shared marks public and people that interact with on my Google Profile or through GMail can view what I thought shareworthy. The shared items category also produces it’s own RSS feed. More on Shared Google Readers items. (To find your shared items feed url, click on shared items in “Your Stuff” in the left sidebar and then “details” and you will see the url for your shared items feed. Make sure to check your shared settings are set to public. )

So, you know that means, right? I can be waiting in line somewhere, scrolling through my blog subscription on my phone and decide to hit share on one that I really like, and because I’ve set that select RSS feed up on twitterfeed, it posts that hand selected item to twitter. Mind you, this is something I do on twitter anyway, but now there are less steps involved.

Twitterfeed has settings that allow you to add a little text before or after each tweet, something like: Reading or Liked . . . and the link is automatically shortened. You could do this kind of bookmarking to twitter just as easily with a delicious tag feed to twitterfeed also.

13 Google Alerts to Twitter

A reader asked me how to get Google Alerts to post to Twitter automatically so I thought maybe others would like to know as well.

Google Alerts allows you set-up a custom alert notification anytime Google picks up whatever you track – name, product, company, industry, etc. Initially you could only get email alerts but now these alerts can come via RSS.

So, getting your Google Alerts to post to Twitter is pretty easy now. To get them to post to Twitter you need a go between like Twitterfeed.

1) Set up your alert and choose the “feed” option for deliver to – right click the feed link and copy the URL for the feed, it will look something like this
http://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/17750747914485789296/10802436034005942849

2) Then go to your twitterfeed account and link that URL to your Twitter account and you should be done. The posts will go to Twitter at whatever frequency you set up in your Google Alerts – daily or as they happen. This works equally well if you want to post your blog feed, or any RSS for that matter, to Twitter.

I don’t know that this is a great, primary strategy for Twitter use, but it can be a way to mix in some tweets, but beware, whatever Google Alerts catches will post to your Twitter stream unfiltered.

13 Get Your Google Alerts via RSS

I’m a big fan of Google Alerts because it allows you to easily monitor all kinds of names and phrases online, including the writing of journalists you might be targeting for story ideas.

The service made what I think is a nice upgrade over the weekend. Now you can get your alerts via email, as before, and via RSS. So you can subscribe to alerts and have them delivered to your Google Reader page instead of email. I like this because it allows you to more easily file, sort and share the alerts with the built in tools, but, now that it’s RSS you can bend it some other cool ways.

For example, let’s say you are tracking mentions of your awesome product via alerts. You get it sent to your Google Reader account, you like what your read so you hit the Share feature in Google Reader and the alert content shows up on the your Facebook profile via the Feedheads application or post your RSS to Twitter via Twitterfeed.