Are you looking for a free tool that aggregates an RSS feed to your Twitter account? Try TwitterFeed and set up multiple feeds with multiple Twitter profiles…
Update: Twitterfeed shut down on October 31st. Try IFTTT or dlvr.it as a free alternative tool with similar functionality.
Twitter feed (RIP), like many similar tools, aggregated an RSS feed to your Twitter account. TwitterFeed (free) scans RSS feeds for new content and posted it automatically to your Twitter timeline.
Social media APIs change, which renders free tools like this useless after a certain amount of time, but there are alternative tools. This is all just part of the enshittification of the internet in general, meaning the things you took for granted online are taken away in the interests of profit.
Anyway, aggregation tools work best for highly relevant, super targeted niche content. You could also consider your timeline as your own RSS reader for your own consumption, meaning you become part of the audience consuming the content posted to your timeline.
Aggregate Your Website Feed
In the example below, I have been aggregating a custom XML feed I set up on a local website about a new train station being built for the town I live in.
Every time I updated the RSS feed on the website, TwitterFeed would automatically fetch the latest item and post it to the Twitter profile associated with the website:
As you can see in the screenshot above, the articles have had as many as 64 clicks, which is 64 social media referrals to the website.
I built the followers by searching Twitter for the keyword “Ilkeston” in Tweets and profiles with the intention of getting a follow back.
Post Interesting News Stories
My favourite way to use Twitterfeed is to automatically post interesting news stories that the followers will be interested in.
In the example screenshot below, I am displaying the clicks the links have received by scraping Google News results for a Norwegian football player:
Aggregate Your Favourite Content
It’s useful if there is a particular feed of content you are confident about publishing to your Twitter timeline.
Anything you aggregate really needs to be super relevant to your audience, otherwise you’ll just be adding to the general noise of Twitter.
Setting Up TwitterFeed
To set up a new feed you click Create New Feed in the top right corner of the dashboard.
It is then a case of creating or constructing a valid RSS feed which you can paste into the feed builder.
If you want to get extra creative and take content curation to the next level, consider using Sniply to add a speech bubble style floating message on the page of the content you are sharing.
Click the test rss feed link to the right of the box you paste the RSS URL in to make sure it passes the test:
The part that interests me the most is the Advanced Settings. Click this and an entire menu of juicy options is revealed.
Here’s the overview:
Okay, now let’s break it down into sections and go through each part.
The first part of these settings lets you choose how often Twitter feed should refresh the feed and fetch new updates.
There’s an option to display the RSS item as title, title and description or description only. A link shortening drop down menu is provided if you want to configure that.
Below this are a couple of options for posting to LinkedIn and Facebook but I have those turned off. If you have any reason to send your updates to either of these social networks, this is where you set that up.
Pay particular attention to the Post Sorting options. By default you’ll see something called pubDate and this tells TwitterFeed when an item was added to the RSS feed.
The other option is GUID but we don’t usually need to use that if we’re aggregating a valid feed with proper times/dates for each item.
- I ran into some issues with YouTube RSS feeds and I’m 100% certain YouTube feeds have a bug in them, meaning TwitterFeed is likely to repost the same videos over and over again. I found a solution for this which you can read about in this post about setting up common RSS feeds for social media.
Mostly, you can leave it as the default pubDate.
My favourite part of the Advanced Settings is the Post Prefix and Post Suffix.
This is where you may add fixed pieces of text in the Tweet. Your RSS item will be sandwiched between the prefix and suffix when it is is published.
It might be a good idea to look at the average title length of items in the RSS feed you’re aggregating and consider how a prefix or suffix will impact your tweet character count.
Finally, there is a keyword filter for distilling the RSS feed.
I haven’t used this myself because I’ve always been happy with the items being published to my Twitter timelines. You might want to only post items from a particular category of a website and therefore include a keyword related to that subject.
(A far better way to take care of this issue is to fix it upstream by creating an RSS feed for a certain category in the first place and aggregating that. This is taken care of for WordPress websites by default.)
Another way to use TwitterFeed is in combination with Sniply. TwitterFeed provides the hashtags or @mentions and the custom overlay message is provided by Sniply.
Discover how to automatically post content to your Twitter timeline using Sniply and TwitterFeed.
The only drawback with Sniply is that is takes away Twitter cards and means your post lacks the rich data that often attracts more clickthroughs.
Analysis: Handy Tool, But Now Dead and Buried
Used wisely, TwitterFeed style tools are devilishly useful. Employ them with finesse, because it is possible to post way too much content to social media timelines and people will know you’re only auto posting.
With any social media, you cannot automate everything and then not show up to interact. Go look at some similar tools if you’re interested in setting up some auto posting, but frankly, it’s not a substitute for proper online interaction and engagement.
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