Automatically sending articles to Twitter feed

Certainly, there are valid exceptions. And that's one of them.

When I say "auto feeds suck," I mean the feeds that many newspapers run where every headline they've got goes up at the top of every hour (or at midnight, or whatever.) And now you've got every local cops brief and council meeting and budget update clogging up your page. It's annoying.

 

Our Twitter RSS feed gets two or three posts a day — one for news, one for sports and one for the obits.

How do you do the automated things with Facebook? I set up a page for our paper 18 months ago and it's been pretty stagnant, so this could potentially help it get going again.

 

My 17k paper got 3,000 hits one day from links we posted on Facebook. Totally worth it.

 

Also, I finally got the Twitter RSS feed set up but it is only sending about two stories per day across the feed. Sorta sucks. Oh well, that's two less stories I have to post to Twitter each day.

 

We haven't had as much luck with Twitter, but Facebook has been a great tool to help drive traffic. It consistently ranks in our Top 10 referring sites.

 

Ours is up to our third referring site. We have a significant amount of friends, but so far on Twitter, we only have about 50 followers.

Gotta' start somewhere.

 

More and more people expect news to find them.

I hated Twitter at first, but after I got past the too-cutesy culture (all the tweet puns), I realized that even if Twitter isn't around to stay, the idea behind it will. It's a method of passing information around instantly, and into like-minded communities.

Whether Twitter becomes Facebook-like in ubiquity or something else usurps it, newspapers have to get in the habit of being on top of these channels, even if they don't seem like sure-fire bets at the time. Some will certainly grow too big to ignore at some point, so it's good to be open-minded.

As far as Twitterfeed is concerned, it's OK if it's supplemented by human interaction (like posts, replies and retweets). By itself, it doesn't help much.

 

We have a couple thousand twitter followers and growing. the links go out to cell phones, blackberries, iPhones, etc. And if the tweet is a good headline it can create an instant click and read.

I've grown to be a big twitter fan. Perhaps too big

 

It isn't so much that people resent the RSS dump from newspapers ... it's often that there's no personal engagement from the source. CBC Calgary does a really good jump of treating its account like an RSS feed but also responding to Tweets from followers and using it to crowdsource stories.

 

This article on Poynter is about Facebook, but the idea of getting content to people in whatever way they find easiest applies across all platforms:
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=169112

I mean, you can say F-U to Twitter, but let's say Twitter's not a flash in the pan and it's around for a few years. Want newspapers to keep their heads in the sand forever? It's worth the few seconds to post to Twitter to expand our audience, isn't it?

 

I started using Twitter for my beat at the start of the preseason. It's been great for posting little noteworthy items, plugging things that are coming up and for linking to my stories. I know I've been taking away traffic from the primary message board devoted to the team, which posts links to all my articles, and I've gotten far more reaction from readers than I ever have before.

The readers seem to love it and I've enjoyed doing it far more than I expected to.

 

As far as automatically populating a Twitter feed, TwitterFeed is great.

First, you can adjust how often you want it to do it's business, with options as frequent as every half-hour. Depending on how much content your RSS is pushing, you need to find the happy medium -- not too much, not too little. Second, I set it to give nothing more than the title, as opposed to the title and description. Too often, the description just looks sloppy because it is much longer than 140 characters. Third, Twitter feed also allows you to add intro or exit text to all automatic feeds. I use this to set apart the headlines from the interactions I have with followers or my non-RSS posts. Finally, I like to use bit.ly to shorten my urls so I can see exactly how many views I am generating by specific url. This can be huge in the "doing-more-with-less" environment.

And I echo what some have already said... unless you are the New York Times' headline feed, you really can't afford to leave updating a Twitter feed to the robots. Twitter is about interaction and collaboration. RSS only is too one-directional, and Twitter regulars will get bored with that quick, especially when they can go elsewhere and get their news AND feel connected to those sharing it.