Saturday, February 16, 2013

How to Post Your Blog Article Notifications to Twitter and Facebook

There are multiple reasons for using a blog rather than Facebook, not the least of which is the much larger potential audience.  Detailing the points probably serves no purpose as it's not likely you would be reading this if were are not aware already of the advantages of a blog-type platform for your writing.

Having written something in your blog, the next consideration is how to publicise it and there are multiple targets for such publicity.  There are many ways to send an update message to Twitter, not so many to Facebook, and relatively few for Google+.  Sending an update message to Facebook or Google+ is not your best approach as any information that goes into those systems typically does not come back out again.  However, many systems will read Twitter content and this makes it especially useful for publicity.

The problem to solve is how, after you write an article, can you get other systems to know you have done it.  The way it is accomplished by telling the other systems to poll (i.e. read at regular intervals) your RSS or ATOM file as this is where the machine format of the article is contained.  There are three systems I have validated for performing this function:

  1. TwitterFeed
  2. HootSuite
  3. FeedBurner
Note:  TweetDeck is another solution but I have not evaluated it.  Manage Flitter is another and the same applies.

TwitterFeed is designed expressly for reading RSS / ATOM files and it will poll the file at thirty-minute intervals to look for updates.  It is effective when it works but it is too unreliable for any serious application.  There were times when it took quite a while (e.g. hours) for it to poll the file and there were times when it overlooked it altogether and skipped the update.

HootSuite is considerably more reliable than TwitterFeed but it polls at one-hour intervals which in a modern data processing world is an interminable delay.  My testing did not reveal any times when it missed an update but it was simply too slow.

FeedBurner is very brisk and is highly-reliable.  It's specific purpose is to monitor your RSS / ATOM file so it sees any update almost immediately.  Rather than waiting for thirty minutes to an hour for an update message to be posted through to Twitter, it will perform than action in five minutes or less.  Thus far no updates have been skipped and performance has been highly reliable.


After your update message has been posted to Twitter, the next step is how to post it through to subsequent systems but don't regard Twitter as simply a transport mechanism as there is an enormous audience and ignoring them doesn't make much sense when your objective is publicity.

The Twitter app on Facebook is excellent for taking your Tweets and re-posting them to Facebook.  Some call use of this application 'linkspam' but that will only be true if you post stupid things to Twitter and subsequently post the same stupid things to Facebook.  If you tweet anything of more value than your burning love for Justin Bieber, you will probably want to post the message to both systems.

After you have set up FeedBurner and subsequently the Twitter app, any time you write an article in your blog, the audiences on Twitter and Facebook will be notified in very short order.  This approach is effective, fast, and I have found it highly-reliable.  However, it does not update Google+ and there is not currently a good way to do this.  Google is working on an API to permit propagation of Twitter messages but it is not ready yet and the answer appears to be that one must wait.

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