- Image via CrunchBase
Twitter is a social media platform that some people - like me - use only grudgingly. No offense to all you twitter-heads. I like the platform, but I do not like to tweat very often. I find twitter to be a distraction and rarely useful for my information junkie needs.
That being said, Twitter can be an incredibly useful tool, and I do use it from time-to-time. However, I do not want to have to REMEMBER to use it, so I found a way to automatically tweat my blog posts using Feedburner. If you don't have a free FeedBurner account, I recommend getting one. The service is a great way to get people subscribing to your blogs and to keep them updated on what you are doing.
This blog post assumes that you already have a FeedBurner account and are going to use it to automatically add your new blog posts to your Twitter account. The set-up process will take less than five minutes.
Here is the lesson as a pdf: Tweat Automatically with Feedburner.
How To Tweat Automatically Using Feedburner
A short screenshot session on how to use Feedburner to automatically post your blog posts to Twitter. Feedburner is free. And it was purchased by Google last year, so you will need to log into Google to use it:
Pick Your Feed:
Click the Feedburner Option That Reads "Publicize":
(and try not to laugh at the tab that reads "troubleshootize")
On the left hand menu pick "Socialize"
And Now Click the Tab That Says "Add Twitter Account":
*Please note: You can post to more than one twitter account from one blog. And you can post from multiple blogs to one twitter account. See the end of this post for why you might want to do so.
Google takes you to Twitter where you can connect your Twitter and Google/Feedburner accounts:
If you are already logged in, you can just click "Allow."
Or you may need to log into your twitter account:
For now, leave the options as they are:
Check out the bottom of the page to see how your tweet will look:
My tweats are the "Default," they have my blog post title, plus Google's automatic URL shortener. Pretty cool, eh?
You are not done until you activate the service. My button says "Save." Yours will say "Activate."
Now, write a blog post and watch it show up on your twitter account!
You are now twittering automatically. Every time you make a blog post it will show up on Twitter.
Tweating to and from multiple blogs and twitter accounts
Above, I mentioned that you can post to more than one twitter account from one blog. And you can post from multiple blogs to one twitter account. Why would you want to do so? If you have a business with multiple people blogging, you could set-up one Twitter account for your entire company and have all of you employee's tweats go directly to that one twitter account. It would be a great way for fans of your company to keep up with everything that you are doing. Your employees could tweat to both your company twitter account and their own personal twitter account.
In my case, I have several blogs that are thematically connected. I have both of them automatically posted to the same twitter account. When people follow that one account, they get updates from both those blogs. My twitter account gets more followers and my blogs get more visitors. And because it all happens automatically in the background, I don't even have to think about it.
