The is the second in my series of posts in which I explain how you can use various tools to help automate your social media presence.
Several days ago I discussed how by using Twitter Tools for WordPress one could automatically post links to Twitter when publishing posts with WordPress. Of course, WordPress isn’t the only blogging platform out there, and as a reader pointed out, there are some blogging solutions, such as Blogger, that don’t allow plug-ins at all, making this type of solution impossible.
But if you happen to be using the aforementioned Blogger, or Tumblr, or even WordPress’ own WordPress.com, you’re not out of luck. Though plug-in solutions are not available, you still have an RSS feed, and through the use of this feed you can re-purpose your content in some eye-opening and time saving ways. You only need the proper tool to get the job done.
Enter Hootsuite, which is described by its creators as, “The ultimate Twitter toolbox.” While the mantle of ‘best’ in the Twitter world shifts frequently, there’s no question Hootsuite offers a user interface that replaces and improves upon the one provided by Twitter itself in many interesting ways. You can, for example:
- Schedule tweets to be sent at a future date and time
- Monetize Twitter through intermediate landing pages that include your Adsense code
- Manage multiple Twitter accounts with one Hootsuite acount
- Grant additional users ‘editor’ responsibilities
- Track click-through counts for posted links
- Generate tweets automatically from an RSS feed
For the plug-in challenged, the last point is the most important because it’s the gateway through which any RSS-enabled platform can publish to Twitter, whether it be a blog publishing new posts or an e-commerce store publishing new items. With Hootsuite, it’s as easy as setting up your Twitter account, adding your RSS feed, and defining a polling schedule. The video embedded below shows how simple the process really is:
The only drawback to this solution is that it happens though ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ methods: Hootsuite periodically polls your site’s RSS feed looking for new items and posts them when found. Unlike when using Twitter Tools For WordPress, your tweets won’t be posted instantaneously. For most, this is probably a liveable concession.
