Hello, it’s Mark Felix again with an article on how to automate the posting of your business or offers on Facebook and Twitter. If you do have a business online it is essential to have an account on both Facebook and Twitter to post your business or offerings and if you don’t then after reading this article you need to get your business on both of these networks immediately. There’s a reason why they are the fastest growing websites on the internet.
In this article I am going to walk you through a process that will help you get your posting automated using RSS feeds. Now please tell me that you know what RSS is and what it does because if you don’t then let me suggest you stop reading this article and do some research on RSS feeds and the benefits of using it for your business.
OK, so you do know about RSS Feeds! Fantastic.
A few years ago I became really interested in RSS feeds and read everything I could find on the subject, but my interest was based around getting backlinks using the system and to be honest I’m not sure that I really got what I was looking for.
However, I did find a much better use for my RSS feeds which is what it was probably intended for in the first place, but note that there are many uses for RSS feeds and it’s the ultimate method of getting your information across to many other people/sites when done correctly.
So let’s get down to business here and as most of you might know, building an RSS feed could be hard work especially for someone who does not have the knowledge as to how the system really works, but as promised I will walk you through step by step and after reading this article my hope is that you will have your business automated on Facebook and Twitter.
The first element needed to get you started is your websites URL and for the purpose of this exercise I’m going to use my URL www.airportessentials.com as an example. There are over 100 pages if not more on this site and they are all based on the keywords related to the site’s theme which is Airport Parking, Airport Hotels & Airport Lounges.
Now I could have used a normal RSS feed created for the site but that would have meant that I would need to continuously update the site. Instead, I created a feed that updates itself every time any of the pages gets cached in Bing.
I can hear you saying get to it Mark, Patience, it’s a virtue, my mother use say to me.
Lets head over to Bing and type in “site:www.airportessentials.com” this gives you almost all my pages that are cached by Bing, what many people don’t know which is the trick here is that you can use Bing results as an RSS feed and if you have an SEO plug-in on your browser you will see the RSS icon in the URL bar.
Now stick with me here because we need to add a few bells and whistles to our feed, so now we are going to head over to feedburner. Don’t worry this is no techie stuff just stick with me and you will see how easy this is, if you have a Google account you will have feedburner in your list of items from Google. If not you should sign up for an account today.
Feedburner will actually walk you through the options that you would need to get your feed up and running, the first step is to copy the URL from your browser when you typed in “site:www.YOURSITE.com” and place it in the area that says Burn A Feed This Instant, from there its going to allow you to customise that new URL, try and keep it as short as possible and where possible add a key phrase in your new URL.
After you’ve completed all the required fields, on the third tab that says Publicise you will notice the Socialise link and in there you will notice an option that allows you to post your feed to your twitter account and that is the first of many options you have.
But, we are now going to head over to a site called twitterfeed and this is where we’re going to setup a system that will post on both twitter and Facebook automatically. Here is the link http://twitterfeed.com open an account here and when you log in you will notice the option to post to several accounts but what we need is to post to Facebook and Twitter.
Are you still with me?
Well, hopefully you are because this is it. Now going back to Bing where you typed in “site:www.YOURSITE.com” please note that you are not restricted to using the domain string, you can use anything you want as long as you’re happy with the information you’re sharing, as an example I can query the search to only pull up my site with the word hotels mentioned in the title or anything that I want and create a feed for it and you can do the same.
So to see the whole process in action visit my Facebook account at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Croydon/Airportessentials/151834271495258 just below the link notice it says twitterfeed.
Now visit my Twitter account at http://twitter.com/Airportsentials and it says the same.
It is important that you post to your account manually, so every now and then when I write a new article on something related to my site’s subject, I would then manually post it to my accounts. That’s it.
So here is the format that you need to follow
Step One
Go to Bing and enter your business URL in the search box “site:www.yoursite.com” then copy the URL from the URL bar at the top of your browser.
Step Two
Go to feedburner in your Google account and place that link where it says “Burn A Feed This Instant” hit next then on the “identify feed source” box click on the RSS option then hit next again.
Step Three
Use the option to enter a title and create a new URL for your feed, then hit next. If you follow my instructions above you will now see Congratulations Your Feedburner Feed Is Now Live.
Step Four
Fill in all the options if you can as requested by feedburner. Those you don’t understand you can leave as is but on the tab called “optimize” make sure you activate the SmartFeed link.
Step Five
On the tab called “publicize” you don't have to but you can activate the “socialize” link, this will allow you to enter your twitter account and then post to it. This is the end of your feedburner activities.
At The top of that page just under your feeds name you will see two icons to the left, an RSS icon and a square box, click on the RSS icon and that will be your new feed.
If you fill in all the options requested by feedburner then your feed should look like this one.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarkFelixsMarketingInformation
Step Six
Copy your RSS feed URL in the URL browser above and head over to www.twitterfeed.com
Step Seven
At Twitterfeed click on the Create New Feed button and enter a new title or the same one you created at feedburner, enter your new RSS feed and hit “test rss feed” then you should see this message
"Feed parsed OK, but due to missing pubDates make sure you select 'Post new items based on GUID' in Advanced Settings below"
Hitting the advance settings is self explanatory; make sure you switch to GUID
Step Eight
Hit the continue button and choose your options, this will allow you to Authenticate a new twitter account and then you can do the same for Facebook.
That’s it
Thank you for sticking with me here and hopefully the information I have shared works just as well for you. If you’re having any problems implementing the ideas please send me an email and I will charge you a bookmark or a backlink for my time and or you can do that anyway as a thank you gesture, it would be appreciated I can assure you.
Mark Felix: Owner of the Travelrobe group of travel sites in the UK. The Main site is www.travelrobe.com & www.airportessentials.com is a Stansted Airport Parking, Stansted Airport Hotels & Stansted Airport Lounge site in the UK.
Mark also writes press releases and articles on travel. Part of Mark’s daily activities includes building and promoting niche blogs on various products i.e. Health, Wealth, SEO and Finance.
|
Contributor's Note
I have updated the information by placing a step by step format towards the end of the article as requested by my readers.
|
