Finally, a first post.
It took me a while to decide just what I wanted to post as a first post, then I noticed something RJ had mentioned as he looked to clear up his twitter profiles.
He had been manually posting updates to a twitter profile for the TSB blog.
That works however as he discovered, it become unwieldy after a point trying to manage multiple accounts. Take it from someone that has accounts in the double digits, knowing the tricks to the game go a long way.
Here's a quick how-to to ease the pain of automated tweets for your blog.
Step 1: Identify which account you'll be using. I know it seems automatic but you'd be surprised the amount of people that get stumped by this as they get further along in the process.
Step 2: Twitterfeed.Com
While there are plenty of feed sites & apps out there, I've found Twitterfeed to be exactly what I need to get set up & going fairly quickly.
Go to
twitterfeed.com & register. Once registered, you'll be sent to a new feed page and immediately given the option to add a twitter or facebook account for your fees to post from. For this example we'll stick with twitter. Your options on how to authenticate your account are via OAUTH*, which takes you to twitter for you to approve or deny access for the API or the old school way of using your log in credentials.
*This will take you to twitter, be aware of which profile you're logged in to if you are logged in, if it's the wrong account log out and sign in with the right credentials.
Once you're squared away with access to your twitter account, you can begin to add rss feeds.
Step 3: Adding your feed.
Once you've gotten your feed address copied you can go through the process of adding it to your account.
Feed Name - self explanatory, name it after the site you got it from.
RSS Feed URL - in this box you'll paste your feed url
*Click Advanced Settings*
Update Frequency - this is important as it controls how often twitterfeed checks the rss. If the feed is updated often, you can have it check accordingly.
Post Content - the options here will determine how many characters you use up on the auto post, typically I set this to title only.
Post Link - check this box if it's unchecked choose the url shortener from the list provided - typically I choose bit.ly. If you are a bit.ly power user, then you can use the API from your account to track the posts in your dashboard.
Post Prefix - I leave this blank but you can add something to indicate the nature of the tweet.
Post Suffix - for feeds from blogs with attached twitter accounts I add "[@user]" it shows up after the title information and link in the post.
Skip the rest, I rarely use those settings.
Click Create Feed.
If you want to add another rss feed, just click create new feed and repeat the process. Keep in mind if you're keen on building your social network the right way, less is more.
That's it!
