Connecting Your Blog with Your Twitter Account

If you’re keeping up with your blog, posting two, three, five times a week, you may not always remember to then share those posts with the rest of your network.  I suggest setting up a simple automatic feed from your blog to your Twitter account so you never even have to think about it.  If you followed my instructions to connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts, your Twitter account is already set up to feed to your Facebook profile or page, so once you set up the feed from your blog to your Twitter account, whenever you publish a new blog post, your entire network (Facebook and Twitter) will receive it.

Note: If you use other social networking sites, most will allow an automatic feed from Twitter, so you can set that up on those as well and minimize any duplicate posting you would need to do.

For setting up RSS feeds to Twitter, you can use a Twitter client.  I prefer Hootsuite.  Go to www.hootsuite.com, set up an account, and add your social networking accounts.  Click on the owl in the top left corner and select Settings > RSS/Atom.  Click to add a new feed and add the URL for the feed* you want to add.

*The Feed URL is not the same as the blog URL.  For example, my blog can be found at www.kellyschuknecht.com; the Feed URL, however, is http://www.kellyschuknecht.com/feed/.  If you use Internet Explorer, you can find the Feed URL by clicking on the RSS icon in the Command Toolbar, which looks like this:

Enter the Feed URL and select the settings you want.  You may choose to add text before the tweet, such as “New Blog Post.”  Select the profile you want to send the feed to, in this case your Twitter profile, and click to “Save Feed.”

The next time you publish a blog post, within 24 hours your update should appear as a Tweet.

If you have properly linked Twitter with your Facebook profile or page, this post will also show up as a status update on Facebook.