Updating RSS feed to social networks like Twitter is a good way to get more traffic and backlinks for website. If you're using Feedburner to spread your RSS feed, you can use it as a tool to update new posts to Twitter automatically with just some simple settings.
First, open your Feedburner account, choose the feed you want to publicize to Twitter. Then navigate to tab Publicize, and click on Socialize on the left sidebar. This takes you to a page like in the following screenshot (click to enlarge):
Click on the button Add a Twitter account to connect Feedburner with your Twitter account. You will be redirected to Twitter authorization page (if you have not logged in Twitter yet, you will first redirected to login page, and then authorization page). All you need to do is simply click on the Allow button to allow Feedburner access your Twitter account.
After that, you'll be redirected back to Feedburner page automatically. Now you can adjust settings for display tweets in Formatting Options section:
- in Post content dropdown box, you can choose show Title or Body of posts or both of them. I'm using only Title because it will leave space for others to Retweet.
- Don't forget to check both Include link and Leave room for retweets.
- in Hash tags dropdown box, you can choose display hash tags from categories or not.
- the Additional text is optional (I don't use them at all) for adding text before or after tweets. You might want to add "New blog post: " before tweets for example.
In the Item Selection:
- Item limit is the number of posts you want to update to Twitter.
- Item order is the order of posts, usually is the post date, but you can choose their order in the feed.
- Keyword filter: if you don't want to update all posts to Twitter, just some posts which have given keywords in the title (or body), you can enter these keywords into this field.
Don't forget to preview tweets in the bottom of the page. If it's OK, click Save to finish.
Using Feedburner is one of fastest ways to update Twitter status automatically. Because Feedburner is widely used in almost blogs, this instruction helps us to save time socializing posts without using additional tools.
