It’s been said that Twitter is replacing RSS which is somewhat true if all of the sites you follow are on Twitter and you see their Tweets about new content. However, that’s not the case for all sites so I’ve been using this method to receive all of my RSS notifications via Twitter.
1. Setup a Twitter account just for your RSS notifications
You won’t have to use this account much beyond the initial setup but create an account that will be used just for your RSS Tweets. Use a profile image for this account that’s an RSS icon to make it stand out. For example, my account is @ShannonRSS.
2. Log in to Twitterfeed and setup your RSS feeds
- You’ll need to create a Twitterfeed account and then choose the “Create New Feed” button in the upper-right corner.
- Give your feed a name.
- Enter the feed URL where it says so and give it a test to make sure the address is correct.
- Click on the “Advanced” option at the bottom. Set some options here. I highly recommend putting the feed name in the “Post Prefix” box so that when the RSS info is Tweeted, you’ll know where it’s from. You can also adjust other options here for the content that will be Tweeted to you.
- Click the button to continue to step 2.
- Under available services, choose Twitter. The first time you land on this page, you’ll have to authenticate your brand new RSS Twitter account. After you have it setup, it will be listed as an option here in the drop-down box.
- Click the “Create Service” button and you’re done with this feed.
- Repeat these steps for each feed that you want to subscribe to. This initial setup takes a bit of time but after that, it’s very easy to just occasionally add one.
3. Login to your regular Twitter account and follow your RSS account
So now you’re going to follow yourself and whenever a new Tweet gets posted to your RSS account, you’ll see it in your timeline. If you often miss Tweets in your timeline, you can always go to your RSS account to view the Tweets on that account. You may also want to share your RSS account name if other people want to subscribe to the same RSS feeds.
@geekiestnet
Cool one and am already using it .
@ryanbiddulph
A creative RSS tool Shannon. Thanks for sharing.
@woofeed
Great tip, thanks!
There are also sites like Woofeed.com that allows you to define keywords that you wish to follow, and by using the same method as described above, follow your keyword feed on Twitter.
@tweetmaker
Good info.
Another idea…. if the feed is from a blog where the owner/author has a twitter account you can put their Twitter name in the “Post Suffix” field. Try “via @wtwittername”.
It gives a little bump to the content creators.
@MandMXRSS
Wow. Thanks. I don’t know if I did it the way you intended… but I was annoying my followers by using twitterfeed and since I connect with people in China and US, so I want to have tweets all day and night… but they were annoyed with so many tweets… So I took your idea and made a personal twitter and a RSS twitter from all of our SOCIAL NETWORKING
@webgurl
I tried something like this a couple months ago. I set up an RSS account and followed all the sites I subscribe to in Google reader that I could find on twitter. Since I was managing 2 accounts, I was missing all of my tweets from my normal account, I was also not taking time to clickc on every link that was tweeted and read straight through, so I was saving those to instapaper. After I decided that I really didn’t like doing this and went back to Google reader, all of those links were still in instapaper. I suppose this works if you only have a few feeds, (and I haven’t tried the following the rss account thing,) but I really didn’t like doing this through twitter!