Google has just added two new features to help you take advantage
of social media: a URL-shortening service and the ability to feed your
blog posts automatically to your Twitter account from FeedBurner.
As we’ve discussed (see Get Started with FeedBurner),
FeedBurner creates a browser-friendly way for readers to subscribe to
your blog (either in a feedreader or by email), tracks your subscribers
numbers, and offers a number of other useful tools for optimizing,
publicizing, troubleshooting and monetizing an RSS feed, including integration with Google Analytics. There is really no other service that offers all this functionality... no matter how frustrating FeedBurner's occasion hiccups and glitches may be!
With the release of the new “Socialize” feature, this week, Feedburner takes its feed distribution and analytics service a step further:
To get started, go to the Socialize service on FeedBurner’s
Publicize tab and add the Twitter account to which you would like to
post items from your feed. You can take the default settings and click
[Save] to start socializing immediately, or use the options we offer to
customize exactly which feed items are sent to Twitter and how exactly
you would like them to look. The next time you post a new item to your
feed it will be sent to Twitter (as always, make sure to ping FeedBurner whenever you update your feed so this process happens as near real-time as possible). ~ Socializing your feed with Twitter: Google Adsense for Feeds Blog
RSS Feeds to Multiple Twitter Accounts
Want to tweet your posts with more than one Twitter account? Simply
“burn” another feed at FeedBurner (use same RSS feed URL from your
blog, just give it a different name) and point it at a different
Twitter account.
But do be careful about typos when adding your
Twitter account — right now, there is no way to remove a Twitter
account if you make a mistake, so the only recourse would be to disable
Socialize for that particular feed.
Google Support’s detailed write-up on using Socialize to distribute your feed on social networks says in part:
The FeedBurner Socialize service makes it easy to distribute your
content to interested subscribers or followers on social networks using
any FeedBurner feed you already have. The Socialize service currently
supports distribution on Twitter.
Did you notice the wording of that last sentence? This seems to imply that Google might be planning to add other
social networks in future, perhaps to become the one-stop distribution (and tracking) service for RSS feed-enabled blog content. It should be interesting to watch how this develops!
Goo.gl Shortened Links
As part of the Socialize feature, Google has also introduced a new URL-shortening service
(goo.gl), but this is not yet a replacement for bit.ly, tr.im, ow.ly,
su.pr and the like — it’s only available from the updated Google
Toolbar and through FeedBurner, at the moment. Mind you, Google does say
that if it proves useful, the service could be expanded.
If you already make a practice of tweeting links to new posts on your nonprofit’s blog, you may
have automated that task with one of the existing
feed-to-Twitter services, such as the aptly named Twitterfeed — or
perhaps you prefer to stay away from automation and tweet with the
personal touch? Either way, what Google FeedBurner has on offer here is
the convenience of managing your RSS-to-Twitter feed and your blog
subscribers in the same place, with the potential to tie in to Google Analytics.
What do you think? Will your organization use FeederBurner’s new Socialize feature?