How to publish your RSS feed to twitter

So here is a quick review on how I automatically publish blog content to a twitter account. Before you start moaning about automation and the personal touch, this isn’t used on my personal account – there are times when some clients need this function legitimately 🙂

In the old days, we all used twitterfeed.com, and this was your one-stop-shop for publishing a RSS feed to twitter. This still stands, and is still a great service, however, if you use FeedBurner to burn your RSS feed then there is another way. Google FeedBurner has been burning feeds, providing statistics and making RSS friendly since 2004 (owned by Google since 2007) and since 2006 I’ve been using it to provide blog updates by email and to view statistics on the posts that are being clicked by subscribers (and more).

Once you grab your site RSS feed URL and have pushed it into FeedBurner you are presented with a load of options listed under the following headings:

• Analyze
• Optimize
• Publicize
• Monetize
• Troubleshootize

If you haven’t done already, you should explore ALL of these, right now I’m interested in Publicize > Socialize. This tool has been around for quite a while, but since Google made their URL shortener public it’s brought the FeedBurner RSS-to-twitter function some new attention.

Once on the Socialize page you can add a twitter account and get experimenting with the options. A nifty preview panel will show you what your tweets will look like and you can prefix or suffix the tweet with some custom text, for example:

• I’ve just blogged: #blog-title#
• I’m reading: #blog-title#
• #blog-title# via @richardmackney
• Look at this pile of crap: #blog-title#

You can add hash tags to every tweet and filter your blog posts using keywords. The service looks for new posts every 30 minutes, but you can also use the FeedBurner PingShot service to make sure everyone knows your blog has been updated in as close to real time as possible.

So that’s it really, I suppose I could of just tweeted “Use FeedBurner to automatically tweet your latest blog posts” but where’s the fun in that? … plus all these keywords might get me some new visitors?

(sent from Netbook as fingers couldn’t be bothered to type on the iPhone)