Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

One of the tactics I enjoy using on twitter is to bookmark blog posts and web sites that I think are amazing and share them with my followers. This is one part of my overall twitter posting strategy. (Having a strategy for twitter and employing tactics to meet objectives kind of sounds like how you would approach any aspect of your marketing doesn’t it?)

While I firmly believe this is worth the time it takes to hand select these links, I’m all for finding tools that help me do these kinds of things more easily. There’s a twitter based tool, called twitterfeed, that’s been around for a while that essentially allows you to automatically publish any RSS feed to twitter. Now, it’s easy for me to imagine some silly and spammy uses for this. Blindly autoposting a bunch of blog feeds into twitter doesn’t smack me as a very good tactic, but people do it all the time. That’s not what I’m suggesting here at all.

There are lots of ways to create RSS content, including ways that allow you to hand curate and bookmark content that goes into a feed.

I use Google Reader to subscribe to and read lots of blogs. One feature built into this reader is the ability to “share” posts I find and mark them for others to see. I can make my shared marks public and people that interact with on my Google Profile or through GMail can view what I thought shareworthy. The shared items category also produces it’s own RSS feed. More on Shared Google Readers items. (To find your shared items feed url, click on shared items in “Your Stuff” in the left sidebar and then “details” and you will see the url for your shared items feed. Make sure to check your shared settings are set to public. )

So, you know that means, right? I can be waiting in line somewhere, scrolling through my blog subscription on my phone and decide to hit share on one that I really like, and because I’ve set that select RSS feed up on twitterfeed, it posts that hand selected item to twitter. Mind you, this is something I do on twitter anyway, but now there are less steps involved.

Twitterfeed has settings that allow you to add a little text before or after each tweet, something like: Reading or Liked . . . and the link is automatically shortened. You could do this kind of bookmarking to twitter just as easily with a delicious tag feed to twitterfeed also.

Posted by: John Jantsch on Oct 21, 09 | 4:04 am
Category: Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Web Marketing | Tags: , Google Reader, twitterfeed