The more I talk to people about how they use Twitter the more I find that nobody really uses Twitter in the same way. Today Matthew Lang (follow him at @matthewlang) shares with us the way that he shares bookmarks with his Twitter followers.
You’ve found a great article on the web, you bookmark it for yourself but you want to share it quickly with your followers on Twitter? Copying the url to a url shortening service and posting it on Twitter seems like too many steps.
What if you could bookmark the article and have it automatically posted for you? Well you can! By using TwitterFeed you can share you favourite bookmarks easily and quickly.
TwitterFeed is a service that allows you to publish a RSS feed automatically through to your Twitter account. For this technique I am going to use Delicious, as it uses tags and RSS, which are required for this technique. Many other bookmarking services also use tags and RSS, so you shouldn’t have any problem using your own favorite bookmarking service instead of Delicious.
First of all you need to select a tag in that you will use to filter all the bookmarks that you want to feature on your Twitter account. I suggest you use a tag name that is unique and limits the chances of you mistakenly adding a bookmark that you don’t want to feature in your Twitter account. For this example I am going to be using “twitterlink” as my filter tag.
Now that we have decided on the filter tag to use, we need to hop on over to TwitterFeed. If you don’t already have an account on TwitterFeed then you can create one.
Now we can create a new feed for your bookmarks filter.
Enter your user name and password to test your Twitter account is ready and then enter the following url into the RSS Feed URL text box:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/{username}/{filtertag}
where {username} is your username on Delicious and {filtertag} is the tag we are using on Delicious to bookmark our favourites with.
Next, set the update frequency of your twitter feed. I recommend setting this to 4 hours or more as you don’t want to flood your followers with links.
Next, select if you want to include the title and/or description of your link in the update. Select the check box to include a link with your update and then select your preferred, link shortening service to use.
In the next section, I usually post new items based on their pubDate (published date), as it ensures your latest bookmarks get published first.
Finally enter a prefix if you wish to include one with each of your tweets. For my new items I use “Just Bookmarked”.
Here’s how a typical TwitterFeed looks like when your setting it up:
Once you have setup your TwitterFeed, you can now start bookmarking. When you bookmark a website or url, and you want to feature it in your Twitter account, then simply bookmark the link with the filter tag you selected earlier. TwitterFeed will then publish the link through to Twitter for you.
It should be pointed out that if you publish every bookmark through to Twitter you’ll end up losing followers. To keep your followers happy, bookmark only the links you find worthy of being published through to Twitter. I only post 1 or 2 bookmarks a day through to Twitter using this method. This ensures that my followers are not flooded with a constant barrage if links.
Using this technique, you’ll save some mouse clicks and your links will be shared in a clean consistent fashion that your followers will recognise and hopefully look forward to!
Great ,though i don’t use Delicious much , but – I tried similar thing with Digg , i digg 20 – 30 articles per day and twitterfeed instead of spamming it just puts all the links together and you get the Error so its fails for Digg.
I actually like to manually alert my twitter audience to each thing that I bookmark. However, this is more a result of how much I bookmark on a daily basis. I don’t want to flood people with links. Twitter isn’t a delicious feed. It’s a communications platform that allows you to build an audience for yourself…thus you have to do a lot of quality control to maintain your following.
Cool. Great recommendation. I’d already been using Twitterfeed to auto-publish my blog posts, and I use Delicious somewhat regularly for work and personal links, so this is a great way to spread the word about new stuff I bookmark. Thanks!
I use Diigo to bookmark things. I installed the Diigo toolbar and whenever I want to save something I click on “bookmark.” The box that opens allows me to check a box and send it immediately to twitter too! It takes about 2 seconds! I have my Diigo account set up too so that things I save to Diigo go directly to del.icio.us too. I can’t figure out why Diigo isn’t mor popular!
A feed really makes social media more usable. Thanks for sharing this tips, it will save a lot of 30 seconds.
thanks so much for the instructions. I set it up and it’s ready to go for every 6 hours. I probably only bookmark 3 to 4 sites a week but at least I don’t have to worry about doing it manually! thanks
Whoa! Great Idea, I’m def. using that tip! Thanks again Darren
You can do the same thing through Friendfeed. Setup your FF account, adding all the services you desire, and then on the settings page, let FF know what you’d like to post to Twitter.
Nice! Good write up too. Will most likely start using soon. Thanks!
While I am a fan of automation, I am with Stuart in that I prefer manually adding links to Twitter. That way I’m posting them when I’m on Twitter and can discuss the links with others. I used to feed my blog posts through Twitter but stopped doing it. I now add them manually and usually ask a question, which makes it more interactive.
Great writeup. It’s important to emphasize that users should use this technique with discretion, and not flood their followers with links. In addition to ticking off followers, Twitter might suspend their account for excessive tweeting.
If you want to share a website you stumbled on that isn’t in your RSS Feed, I use a bookmarklet from Twurl to post a link to my twitter account and that works very well too.
@seanwalberg
Well, I already have Del.icio.us set up to populate my Blog’s RSS feed whenever I find cool links… this isn’t so different, just twittery.
I’ll give it a shot. Thanks!
Nice to see a lot of different opinions to this!
For me Twitter is a communication tool, but how you leverage that communication is important. I only share links using this process that I feel are of a high quality. This way I only end up sharing a few every week and my followers don’t feel like they are being flooded with irrelevant tweets.
I share lots of other links manually as well, but these tend to be articles I am reading or interesting websites that fall outside the scope of my TwitterFeed.
Interesthing thanyou.
If you want to see your bookmarks after they have been posted to twitter, you can go here: http://twitturly.com/user/your_twitter_username
For example, here is Darren’s linking history on Twitter: http://twitturly.com/user/problogger
There are no feeds yet, but they are coming.
This would seems good on a same network, but it would seems to get annoying if a person here will bookmarks alot of tihings an then alot of tweets get “spammed.” But its also nice to share small, good links to go content.
Having a twitter only type tag is an excellent idea and a time saver. I stopped posting bookmarks to Twitter, because I tend to add a lot at once, but there are some that I would like to let others know about. If you use a desktop or browser client you are alerted to any responses so it is not necessary to post directly to Twitter.
Great tip about filtering on the delicious.com side of things with a unique tag.
This will be useful for me, but I use Delicious mostly as a bookmarking service for me alone. I usually mark a bookmark as “Do not share,” unless it’s really relevant to my clients or readers. I’m sure I’ll judge even fewer bookmarks as worth broadcasting, so, hopefully, I won’t be spamming links out to Twitter. I’ll be interested to see how this works out.
When you paste a long url into Thwirl it auto converts it into a tinyurl which is pretty slick
A good point well made… I’ve recently started feeding my Delicious bookmarks via a Twitterfeed and had a niggling feeling that it could all be too much some days. So I’ve adopted the “twitterlink” approach now. I think you may have saved me annoying a few folk there! Cheers.
I use the Mahalo Share Firefox add-on instead, this lets me bookmark into Mahalo, and also to Delicious, Twitter, Facebook (and a few other services) all in one go. Before you post, it also lets you choose which services to post to, thus allowing you to not spam too much to Twitter, and only post the really juicy links. I’d argue that this saves on clicks even over the Delicious method described here.
@ShriNagesh
Tats great tip. I’ve been using twitterfeed for auto-tweeting blog posts. Would love to try out posting my delicious bookmarks today. thx for sharing it.
@kentsm
So many strategies so little time! I have just begun to use Twitter seriously in the past month or so. I appreciate the many tools being presented here. I have used twitterfeed for the <a href=”http://www.directoryofkilleen.com/blog”Directory of Killeen blog but never thought about using it for a bookmark feed.
Thanks for the tip!
@franswaa
i don’t have much to say except Thank You! … i’ve been using Delicious for a while now and having it update through FriendFeed and then to Twitter. problem with that is that everything i bookmark get’s posted to Twitter. this is a great way to filter. going to set it up and start trying it out this week!
–
http://twitter.com/franswaa
@jasongreen_us
I also just got started on twitter. Thanks for the tips. It’s always interesting to hear how other people make use of different services.
@bookchiq
I really liked this idea… so much so that I created a special Yahoo! Pipe to do a little pre-parsing of my Delicious feeds and shorten URLs for me. If anyone else would like to use the Pipe, you can set it up here: my Yahoo! TwitterFeed pipe
@stantonmjones
Worked like a charm, thanks.