I’d heard about this Twitter fad for a good year or so, but had never really gotten into it (or Twittered) until after the SMX West search marketing conference in early March. It seemed like almost everyone was using Twitter at the conference for various reasons; whether they were to alert others of the sessions that they were attending, or sharing their favorite blog posts.
Sharing the favorite blog posts is what gathered my attention, since I am an Internet marketer and the ability to gather more eyes to my blog or other sites (along with sites I like) presented itself to be a new and personally untapped opportunity. I signed up to Twitter, followed some of my friends, and after a couple of days I hit 100 followers. I noticed that some of the other bloggers like Pete Cashmore or Andy Beal were routinely dropping links in their Twitter posts and I figured that they must be using some automated tool to distribute RSS via Twitter. The next step was performing the simple query on Google; “RSS to Twitter” and ranked in the top position was Twitterfeed.
Twitterfeed automatically twitters your RSS feed to all of the tweets following you on Twitter. Signing up is simple; you need an OpenID account (use your Yahoo OpenID) and well, a Twitter account. Here are the steps :
- First set up a twitter account where you would like to broadcast your blog RSS feed.
- Then, go to Twitterfeed and login using OpenID. If you are a Yahoo user just login using your Yahoo profile information.
- Then set up your Twitterfeed account by entering in your blog’s RSS feed.
- One RSS feed is not limited to one Twitter account, so if you have multiple accounts you can send your RSS to all of them. And vice versa. If you have 10 blogs, you can consolidate all of your RSS feeds into one Twitter account.
- Choose the frequency of the Twitterfeed. You can send posts every 30 minutes or once a day. If your Twitter account has lots of friends, you may not want to overwhelm them with posts every 30 minutes.
- You can list the post titles or the descriptions in Twitterfeed.
- You can also add a prefix to the blog posts. This way, if you have multiple blogs you can label them : Blog1, Blog2
- You can set the amounts of updates each time, so if you only want to send one you can, but you are allowed to send as many as five
Twitterfeed is quite easy to use and set up and then once you’re done, your blog posts will be sent to your followers about 10 to 15 minutes after they are posted. I’ve noticed that sometimes posts are skipped, so it’s not perfect.
I’d like to be able to set up multiple feeds under one Twitter account instead of setting them up separately or even randomly choose from a set of my favorite blogs, so it looks like I’m actually doing research and sharing these posts with my friends (and not automating my social networking).
Twitterfeed is in beta testing, so it may have some bugs, but to help smooth out their issues, you may want to make a donation to also keep it advertising free.
I know I wrote about Twiitterfeed last week, but this post is part of a Twitter Tool Carnival being run today on SEJ and these other blogs :
- Twitterfox Review
- Twhirl Twitter Client
- TwitterTools : Integrate WordPress and Twitter
- Twittering and Twitterific – A Review
- TwitterBerry app for BlackBerry and Twitter
- Twitter and TwitBin – Microblogging Made Easy
- Netvibes, Twitter and SMO
- The Guide to Being a Drunken, Debaucherous Twit
