Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Integrating Twitter, Facebook, and Your Own Content




I have found out how to announce every new blog or YouTube post I make on Twitter and Facebook automatically.

I have 3 blogs. I look at blogging like journaling. This particular blog does not get updated much because it contain my favorite web gadgets and widgets. I use it primarily for testing and sharing information about new technologies. My main blog, What Had Happened Was..., covers my interests in my family, movies, television, history, apologetics, news, and a lot of general stuff. My other blog, Favorite Fiction, is where I share articles and posts on my favorite fictional characters from comics, video games, movies, and other media and has become more like my MUGEN blog, where I can post characters I find and information. I ran into a problem. How do I announce new articles? I realized that Twitter and Facebook are great venues for this. However it is a pain to type out little blurbs and links for each article (I post at least one article a day). The answer is use the same RSS FEEDS that are used for Goggle Reader. There is this service called Twitter Feeds that allows you package your blogs, website, YouTube feed, or any content into an RSS Feed that can be read and published in in Twitter and Facebook! Therefore when I publish an article an alert shows up on Twitter and Facebook. My favorite Fiction blog was getting many visits before I implemented this, but the main blog was getting an average of about 12 visits a day. Since I started feeding Facebook and Twitter the number of visits to my main blog has more than tripled! This could even work on MySpace.

1. Sign up for a Twitter account at Twitter
2. Sign up for a Facebook account at Facebook
3. Sign up for a Twitter Feed account at Twitter Feed
4. Use Twitter Feed to set up a feed for each content source you want to use. In my case I use my 3 blogs and YouTube
5. Set up Facebook so that it uses those feeds from Twitter.
Done!

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