Another quickie via Google searchers: how do you automatically publish your RSS feed to Twitter?

Firstly, be sure that you want to. I've seen eBay sellers and other ecommerce merchants publishing their product listings to Twitter. If that's a couple of dozen items at a time, at one tweet each, it's a surefire way to lose a lot of followers. Think about what you'd like to read. Automation isn't the answer to everything.

If you're WordPress blogging, use a plugin

As I've said before, Twitter Tools is my favourite Twitter-related plugin for WordPress. It can be set to either automatically create a tweet from each blog post you publish, or you can choose at the time of publishing whether you want to make a tweet or not:

• Set the option to "Create a blog post from each of your tweets?" under Settings > Twitter Tools,
• if you choose "no" but want to tweet one particular post, set the custom field "aktt_notify_twitter" to yes for that post.

Or use an external service

I've used Twitterfeed pretty extensively in the past. You have some control over the format of the tweet, and (for prolific bloggers) how often and how many posts at at time are tweeted for you. There's also the facility to suspend tweeting a feed temporarily.

If the RSS feed you want to Twitter is from a self-hosted WordPress blog, I'd stick with Twitter Tools: I like being able to decide, as I post, if I want a automatic tweet or not. But if Twitter Tools isn't available for you, then the service offered by Twitterfeed is very useful indeed.

Tags: Alex King, RSS, Twitter, Twitter Tools, WordPress

Posted by Sue on June 3, 2009 in WordPress.