Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Twitter - Startup #6 - Using Feeds

Some twitter accounts, you will learn to recognize them, use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to automatically tweet new information from designated sources as it becomes available. Beware, there are several pitfalls to using this as your sole approach to tweeting.
  • Social Media is meant to be Social, so if you aren't going to interact, maybe your best bet is to go elsewhere, or change how you are approaching this
  • The more you fill someone's stream (the replies they see in twitter) with possibly irrelevant information, the less likely they are to be interested in following and interacting with you
  • You might get marked as SPAM and your account could be discontinued by twitter.

Any number of tools can be use to do this and new ones are popping up all the time. Here are just a few:
  • Yahoo Pipes - This tool lets you aggregate infomation from various sources filter what you want and create an RSS feed from it. This is a powerful tool.
  • Feedburner - part of google this tool is a great tool for organizing your feeds
  • Twitterfeed - With an account on this site you can name your feeds (best to use feedburner feeds) assign when you want them to search for new information (how often), even assign a twitter account to tweet from and a bit.ly account to shorten links and track from.
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1 comment:

  1. I was using Twitterfeed to push out my blog posts and that worked fairly well, especially since I could set things up so posts would appear early east coast time. Since I'm in the southwest, it feels like I'm always chasing the east coast. However, I recently decided to manually post to Twitter. It gives me better control over when to insert my posts, decide if a post is appropriate for Twitter, and to add hashtags. And you're right, you still have to engage in conversation. I dip in and out of my Twitter feed during the day and evening, making sure to RT and to thank any RTs, mentions and comments others have sent my way. I think auto posting does work well if you are posting more than once a day on your blog, as some people do.

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