How to Post an RSS Feed to Twitter

It can be tricky to keep your Twitter content fresh and interesting or 'add value' for your followers as the internet marketers put it. So adding RSS feeds to auto-post to your twitter stream can help you to build up a reputation on Twitter without you having to spend your whole day updating your status.

You can add RSS feeds from your site, other websites or even on specific subjects grabbing updates from around the internet. This is by no means a replacement for actual human interaction with your Twitter followers it is simply a tool that can help with automated targeted content.

Step one - Finding Targeted RSS Feeds

You will need to add RSS feeds to your site that are relevant to the target audience of your Twitter account. There is no point posting the RSS feed for a car blog if your followers follow you for news about books for example. Targeting is key, but don't worry there are bound to be plenty of people talking about things that will interest your followers.

Go to any relevant website and look for the small RSS feed icon and left click on it, choosing “properties” from the drop down menu. Copy and paste the URL you will find into a note pad ready for step two.

Next go to Google Alerts. Google Alerts allows you to get an RSS feed based on keywords you specify. Choose some relevant keywords, set them as RSS feeds, and collect the URLs in the manner described above. You can made as many feeds as you like and they will pull content from across the web. This is great because this gives your followers targeted content from numerous websites without you needing to collect all the sites RSS feeds manually.

Step two- Posting The RSS Feeds to Twitter

There are a number of third party services that can help you post your RSS feeds to Twitter for free the most popular of which is TwitterFeed. These services allow you to post the RSS feeds you have collected directly to Twitter.

Once you have logged-in to your service of choice it is simply a matter of adding your Twitter account information and placing the URLs you have collected into the relevant boxes. You will then have a number of options. Firstly you will need to ensure that only the titles from the RSS feed is posted because of the Twitter character limit. Your followers can then click through if they want to read more. You will then have other options such as inserting a prefix before each posting, URL shortening and how often and how many updates are posted, it's up to you how you use these.

Step three - Check Your Twitter Account

Check your Twitter Account to see if the RSS feeds are working properly. Depending on what service you use they may take some time to go live, but once they have you will have a stream of relevant targeted content flowing into your Twitter account. One great side effect of having this free source of automated targeted content is that your followers may re-tweet posts of interest to them gaining you greater exposure.

I hope this helps you out with your Tweeting and you enjoyed reading this guide.