How to Auto-Post to Social Media from RSS Feeds
Posting great content precedes an increase in followers. More followers leads to more engagement. More engagement produces brand awareness and income growth potential.
Often times, users are unsure what to post on their social media that will be most interesting to their followers and open them up to gaining new followers. In times like this, it’s helpful to piggyback off of the content generated by field experts; for example, if you have a Twitter account dedicated to marketing, it’s a good idea to post articles from top marketers in the world to your Twitter feed.
In fact, this is such a common use case that it becomes desirable to automatically post new articles from specific sources to your social media profiles to produce a constant stream of useful posts.
One such method to do this is available at Heroic Social. While mainly seen as a Twitter audience management and engagement tool, Heroic Social has been greatly expanding the features available in it’s Publisher toolset. The latest feature to be released is… you guessed it, auto-posting from RSS feeds.
We’ll walk through getting an RSS feed set up to automatically post to your social media profiles in the steps below.
First, login to heroicsocial.com with a Twitter account and click the “Publisher” button in the top header. As mentioned previously, there are numerous tools available for growing Twitter accounts, but we’re interested in the Publisher tools right now.
The Publisher tools at Heroic Social already include standard things such as scheduling posts, attaching media, and posting to multiple profiles simultaneously. RSS feeds are an additional feature added to this toolset. To configure an RSS feed, click the “Feeds” link in the menu on the left.
After the page loads, enter in some search criteria to search for an existing RSS feed. In this example, we’ll just search for RSS feeds related to “social media” and click the “Search” button.
Heroic Social will search for RSS feeds related to your search term and present them to you along with the current number of subscribers and a score based on popularity and other things. Find a suitable RSS feed for your social media focus and click the “Add” button.
A popup will immediately appear with several options to configure the RSS feed. The first task is to add a profile to the feed. Heroic Social (currently) allows you to link Twitter account, Facebook accounts and pages, and LinkedIn accounts so you can auto-post the RSS feed to multiple profiles.
To add your first account, click the “Add a Profile” button.
A list of your social media profiles on Heroic Social is displayed allowing you to select one to add to the RSS feed auto-post. If you’d like to post to additional profiles that are not shown here, you can add them on the Social Profiles page.
Next, it’s time to configure how you want the RSS feed to be updated on your profiles. Click on the “Updates” tab to configure the following items:
- What to do when new items are discovered on the feed — you can share the item immediately, or add it to your queue to be published at defined days and times according to your schedules
- How often to look for new posts on the RSS feed — if you’re queueing posts, it’s recommended to check the feed frequently, however if you’re posting updates immediately, you may want to check less frequently
- A maximum number of updates to be published each time the feed is checked (desirable to limit this for feeds that post very frequently)
- A maximum number of posts to be published each day for this feed
Lastly, Heroic Social provides the ability to prepend and/or append your own messages to the default text for RSS update posts (by default, the message/tweet that gets published is the title of the article).
For example, if you want to prepend a hashtag or two to the post, or finish it off with a hashtag or even a link of your own, you can do that from the “Text” tab on the Feed Settings. If you add more than one prefix, one will be selected at random for each post (and similar for suffixes).
At this point, you can close the Feed Settings dialog and, if desired, add additional feeds to your account.
Once the RSS feeds get periodically checked and new articles are found (which may not be immediate), your selected social media profiles will automatically publish a post either immediately or at a scheduled time in the future depending on how you configured the feed.
That’s all there is to it!
It’s quick and easy to automatically publish great content to your social media profiles if you use the right tools for the job. Heroic Social enables you to automatically post to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn from RSS feeds and ensure that you get great content in front of your followers in a timely, effective manner.
