Automatically Tweet Your Blog Posts

If you maintain a writer's blog, and you also use Twitter, do you have your system set up so that your blog posts are automatically tweeted too? If you don't, it's pretty easy to set up. I thought I'd run through how I do this in case you want to do the same.

Like many people, I use Feedburner to provide the RSS feed address that I publicize. In other words, I point Feedburner at the raw RSS feed this blog generates (the clumsy http://spellmaking.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss) then tell people about the address Feedburner exposes (the rather nicer http://feeds.feedburner.com/spellmaking). The point is that Feedburner also provides various enhancements and improvements to the process of creating the RSS feed, and one of these is the automatic tweet facility.

So what do you do? Go into your feed in Feedburner and click the Publicize tab. From there choose Socialize from the menu on the left. This takes you to the Twitter connection set-up page. Add your Twitter account there and, actually, you're pretty well done done. The neat thing, though, is that you have some control of what gets sent to Twitter and how. For example, I have Feedburner automatically prefixing my tweets with "#writing blog post -", which makes it a bit clearer to my Twitter followers what is going on, and which also, hopefully, makes me visible to a wider circle of interested readers because of that "#writing" hashtag. I also have Feedburner including a link back to the original post in the tweet, so people can easily find my blog.

This is all really very easy to set up and the great thing is, once it's done you can forget about it. Your blog posts will automatically be tweeted too. Why not give it a go?

PS. My set up is actually a little more complex than this because I wanted certain blog posts - the flash fiction ones - to be tweeted in a different way (with the "#vss" hashtag for example). I won't bore you with how I did this just now, but it is possible and if anyone's interested, I can explain how in a later post.