Sarah Worsham

Twitter has been a great way for us to connect with customers, partners, marketers, designers and lots of interesting people.  We also use Twitter to provide information which we hope is useful to our followers.  Much of this information is gathered via RSS feeds which is then sent automatically to Twitter every so often using Twitterfeed.  As nice as Twitterfeed is, it still doesn’t have everything I need or want.  I’ve also tried ping.fm, AllYourTweet, and HootSuite.  While each has a particularly strength, none seems to offer exactly the combination that I’m looking for. Many utilities try to send to multiple social networks.  Right now  I have more control of how my content is seen in each place with RSS feeds.

Needs:

• Send tweets from Multiple RSS – each with their own separate settings
• Ability to choose how often and how many items from each feed
• Send from feeds by either published date & time or the order of the feed
• Send a title or a title & partial description
• Automatically convert any links to short urls
• Schedule specific tweets for future dates & times
• Automatic follow/unfollow
• Manual follow/unfollow
• Tweet frequency of at least every 30 minutes

Wants:

• Statistics on how many times each tweet url is clicked on – and by who
• Suggest people I should be following (or unfollowing)
• Set certain people to be followed even if they aren’t following me
• Take multiple items from a feed from a certain date or what’s not been tweeted and dole them out every so often (instead of me having to add periodically to the feed myself)
• If a whole feed could be taken by what’s not already been sent, tweet a post every 10 minutes or so instead of multiples at every 30m or every hour.

That’s all I could come up with off the top of my head.  HootSuite seems to be closest, but I couldn’t get it work reliably with our Google Reader feed.  Hopefully they’ll improve the service with time.  Until then, I’m sticking with Twitterfeed.

Do you have other needs or wants to add to the list?

(photo by takomabibelot @ Flickr CC)

Technorati tags: twitter, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, business, social networks, marketing

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