RSS In Social Media

RSS in social media is mostly about taking one or more RSS feeds of stories you like and posting them out to your social media sites. This can happen automatically as the item appears, or it can be held an you can decide which items get posted. This gathers lots of convenient content at your fingertips to be shared out to others.

I'm mainly a content curator. I find things of interest and share them. Occasionally I'll post a link back to one of my sites, but not often enough to seem spammy.

I start by bookmarking webpages that I think my readers would find interesting and informative. I used to use delicious.com, but I'm afraid they're dead or dying now.

So now I keep my bookmarks in a blogger blog. The problem is there aren't separate fields for a link and text. So I set the link as a header element: <h4>.

Hootsuite is a platform that's designed to bring all your social media posts, replys, comments, etc. under one roof (or window, actually). Part of that is the posting of items from your RSS feeds to social media. This functionality is similar to Buffer. See our article about them. It's about the same drill, set up your social media accounts, your RSS feeds and post away. I've used Hootsuite a bit and I don't like its user interface as much as Buffer, but it does other things that Buffer doesn't. The moral of the story as always: do your system requirements. List out what you want your social media management tool to do and do an analysis of which tool fits your needs best.

Pricing is free, $9.99 per month, and up. How far up? Their website is pleasantly vague on that.

Buffer is the social media management tool I use. You set up your social media accounts. These are the usual suspects: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest. You also set up your RSS feeds coming in. The latest posts on your feeds are displayed and you get to que them up for the social media platforms. You can set schedules of when these entries get posted, they'll even suggest optimal times.

The pricing for their plans are: free, $10, $99, $199 and $399 per month. Yes, I'm on the $10 plan and it's plenty for an individual.

The TwitterFeed.com site looks horribly old-school. It got bought out by bit.ly and I'm afraid they haven't put much effort into updating it. Their last blog entry was about ten months ago as I'm writing this. The deal is that you can set up an RSS feed to post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, a LinkedIn company page or app.net (?!?). The service is free, which is a kinda big deal in this day and time.

dlvr.it is a website that can take your RSS feed and post new items to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+. You can log in with your Facebook or Twitter accounts, or set up a new account. They're a paid service with no initial free term.

There's a really great article over at SocialMediaExaminer.com about how to be a Reddit power-reader and create custom multi-reddits. From there you can share via buffer via the buffer browser extension or just get the url of your subreddit and add a .rss extension and get the feed from it. Disclaimer: reddit switched from RSS to Atom in January 2016, but they kept the .rss extension. I would've liked them to maintain the rss and just added a .atom extension, but I don't work there.