twitterfeed

Sarah Worsham / Apr 15, 2009

What I Want in a Twitter Utility

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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Sarah Worsham / Mar 31, 2009

Twitter Tip – Automate Sending Articles to Twitter from Google Reader

I used to mark articles in delicous to be automatically sent to my Twitter feed via Twitterfeed. Now, I am able to mark articles from anywhere with my iPhone and have them sent automatically to my Twitter feed using Google Reader. This method requires both a Google account on Google reader, and an account on Twitterfeed (both are free).

In Google Reader, in the upper right, click on Settings
Click on the Folders and Tags tab.
Click on the checkbox next to “Your shared items”
Go up to the box that says “change sharing…” and select Public.
Click on View public page (it’ll be empty right now).
Now go back to the feed in Google Reader. At the bottom of any post you want to share, click “share”.
If you refresh the public page, you’ll see your items show up.
On the right side of the public page, you’ll see an item that says Atom feed. Click on it (it’ll probably show a bunch of code stuff.) This is the feed to the items you want to share. Copy the URL at the top of the window
Goto twitterfeed.com and sign up for their free service.
Login to the service. Click “my feeds”
Click “Create new feed”
Enter the username and password for your twitter account (you can then test to see if it’s working)
Paste the URL of the Google Reader public page where it says “RSS feed URL”
Feel free to mess with the other options, but they should be fine if you want to leave them, so click “Create”.

Twitterfeed will automatically check what you’ve marked as “Share” in Google Reader every hour (or whatever you set as the frequency) and then send it to your twitter feed for you.

(photo by jurvetson @ Flickr CC)

Technorati tags: twitter, google reader, internet marketing, business, content, content strategy, twitterfeed, marketing

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Sarah Worsham / Mar 5, 2009

Twitter Tip – Automate Tweets with Twitterfeed

The point of Twitter is to have a conversation, but it also nice to send out useful information to your followers – perhaps links of interest or a link when you post to your blog. Twitterfeed allows you to use RSS feeds to automatically send links to your Twitter account. Just add the RSS feed from your blog to Twitterfeed and you will automatically tweet the blog title with a link whenever you add a new post.

Once you have an account you can add any RSS feed and tell Twitterfeed how often you want it to post items from your feed (every 30m, every hour, etc) and how many items to post (1-5). Twitterfeed will only post new items, so don’t worry about posting redundant content. Once you add a feed it may take a few minutes for Twitterfeed to pick it up.

Twitterfeed can also be used to post directly to identi.ca and custom laconica installations. Using Twitterfeed in conjunction with Ping.fm or HelloTxt you can also post to any sites those services support.

Here at Sazbean, we use Twitterfeed to automatically tweet our blog posts and links we add to delicious.

If you use Twitterfeed, we’d love to hear how in the comments.

Technorati tags: twitter, twitterfeed, content strategy, business, social media, marketing, strategy

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