Socializing your feed with Twitter

Monday, December 14, 2009 | 12:23 PM

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Sometimes you reach across the hedgerow to share with your nearby neighbors. Other times, members of the household move away and yet you can't keep from calling to remind them to wear a hat and such because it's chilly out. Today, we're celebrating acquaintances near-and-far by launching the ability to send your feed to Twitter.

FeedBurner has always been about measuring, managing, and monetizing syndicated content. Our hope is that by providing one application in which you can direct your feed in real-time to a number of endpoints, in this case Twitter in addition to the myriad feed readers, aggregators, and search engines that we have always supported, and then following on with providing analytics for measuring exactly how and where your feed gets distributed across social media, you can make better and more informed decisions about how to monetize your content.

Many of our publishers who have tried our Google Analytics feed item link integration have already noticed that their most popular feed items have been shared many times on Twitter.




We're now taking our distribution and analytics a step further by enabling the ability to automatically publish the feed items that meet your criteria to Twitter, using the Google URL shortener at goo.gl.

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).

For full details on all Socialize options, see our FeedBurner Help Center topic.





To see the results, take a look at the Twitter account in which you are sending your updates. This blog post, for instance, as well as select blog posts from this and the FeedBurner status blog, will appear from now on at http://twitter.com/feedburner. If Twitter is where you are consuming most of the latest content these days, please follow @feedburner to receive our updates in your favorite Twitter client.

Posted by Steve Olechowski  - Product Manager, on behalf of the Google FeedBurner team

81 comments:

AA said...

Feedburner has effectively lots its mojo. I was using it for Wordpress.com blog for email notification, while I was also promoting its separate RSS feed address. Now that Wordpress.com has it's own email subscription service plus it's own mechanism to shoot Tweets, I see no reason to support Feedburner (I can't figure out what Feedburner provides that Wordpress.com does not).

DarkUFO said...

Hi,

Fantastic addition!

Question
I have 5 Twitter Accounts for various feeds. How do I tell feedburner to only use the specific Twitter Account for each Feed. Currently it seems that it will send a tweet out to all my Twitter Accounts.

We need the ability to say which feeds go to which twitter accounts

eg Feed 1
I would like this to tweet out to Twitter Accounts 1 and 2

Feed 2
Would like this to tweet out to Twitter Accounts 1 and 3

Feed 3
Would like this to Tweet out to Twitter account 4

etc

Is this possible?

Unknown said...

Bloody briliant! By by twitterfeed..

freitasm said...

Looking good... May I suggest a third option for "Additional text" as in "beginning of the post - no additional space"?

On Twitter I just mark the tweets I want to retweet as "favourite" and use my Favourite RSS feed as a source. It then posts to my Twitter account with "RT @" in front, but Feedburner adds a space - so it looks like "RT @ feedburner" instead of "RT @feedburner".

Please?

Anonymous said...

This is pretty cool...

And, not to pick nits, but it's "hashtag", not "hash tag" (the space makes it look a little too drug-related!).

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much for this! One thing that has worried me about other services is the downtime they frequently undergo. By moving away from those services, combined with the reliability of goo.gl I feel much more secure. As a Blogger user I appreciate all this integration. Thanks again Google!

Andrew Lombardi said...

One thing I'm not seeing, is how to remove a Twitter account added in error.

Am I missing something?

Anonymous said...

Really cool.

I've been dreading setting up a Twitterfeed account because I didn't want to have to remember another password. Now I don't have to.

Anonymous said...

Huge problem: it repost my entries every single time an update is made. See example here:
http://www.cloudave.com/link/google-s-feedburner-social-isn-t-quite-ready-back-to-twitterfeed-for-now

Unknown said...

@DarkUFO - right now a feed can only publish out to one twitter account at a time, however, you can easily create copies of your source feed (just burn it again) and have the second copy go to another Twitter account. You can attach multiple Twitter accounts to your Google account.

@freitasm - thanks for the suggestion - we will look at adding this

@Andrew Lombardi - you can't remove a Twitter account right now, but you can add an additional Twitter account

@Zoli Erdos - we're looking at your particular case to see what's special with your particular wordpress installation and feed generator - what you describe is not widespread across all blogging platforms/feed generators

DarkUFO Adsense Account said...

@Steve: I've found a little issue.

I have multiple feeds and have created new copies so that I can tweet out to multiple twitter accounts.

Some of these feeds get "stuck". No update for hours despite new posts going through on the blog and also out to the other twitter accounts.

However, if I edit my Feed in Feedburner and go to Publicize tab and then Socialise and hit the save button again to resave all the posts go out instantly.

Unknown said...

I hooked up my google reader shared items feed to this earlier today. I've shared two items since (both show up in my feedburner feed) and neither has gone to twitter. Is the socialize service down or is there something that I have set up incorrectly?

My shared item address is -
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/15289338315609921954

Unknown said...

@Danny Riley - this is because the source feed is invalid - http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http://www.google.com/reader/shared/15289338315609921954
We're working with the Reader team to figure out why.

You can usually find this information on the "Troubleshootize" tab.

@DarkUFO - are you pinging us after you update the feed? If you do not ping us, a feed with a lot of subscribers will get updated more often than one with no subscribers - so we recommend a ping after update - there's a link in the post above on how to do that.

Unknown said...

@Zoli Erdos - we found the issue that is causing the multiple posts when feeds are updated. It was a special case in your type of feed when guid=permalink. This has been fixed, and is being pushed to our servers globally, which unfortunately is not a quick process. Expect it to be live in a couple days.

Stuart Ian Burns said...

How about adding Google Shared feeds in with the Link Splicer options?

Anonymous said...

@Steve

I experienced the same thing as Zoli Erdos, if you want another feed to look at. I also have the guid == permalink. Its at http://blog.darkhax.com/feed

Looking forward to the fix!

Salimane Adjao Moustapha said...

Feedburner does not fetch feeds content at 30mn time interval as stated. And will be possible to set the time shorter ? you could do this in twitterfeed and it does fetch new items at the specified time intervals
Thanks

Unknown said...

I also have problems with Google Reader Shared Items > Feedburner > Twitter. What's the status of this problem?

Unknown said...

@everyone - the problems with duplicate tweets on updates and Reader Shared items not posting should now be fixed. Thanks for helping us find these cases.

Mack said...

I just wrote my first post after turning on this feature. I wanted "New Blog Post:" at the beginning, and the preview shows it that way. Unfortunately the actual tweet has "New Blog Post:" at the end. :-(

Unknown said...

@Mack - we can't seem to recreate this problem - but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. if we can figure out what your feed is, we'll take a look (you can DM it to @feedburner twitter address)

JIDF said...

How does one's feedburner subscriber count go from 3,700 to 1,100 in one day?

Tom Kirkpatrick said...

Hi -

I have been working with Franklin Tse to move subscribers from an old
feed to a new feed.

The old feed is deleted with a 30-day redirect, but my subscribers
have not been
moved.

Franklin has not been answering my emails for several weeks. The old
feed (and the subscriber list) will soon be deleted. My account is
[email address].

New feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/springfield1978/kcKg

Please help!

Tom K.

Gonzague said...

Hi guys

Lots of people seem to have this problem :

- Posting from WordPress with the Twitter thingie configured on FeedBurner
- WordPress pings Feedburner which tweets
- User clicks the link and lands on : http://twitpic.com/uxo14 this kind of pages and a minute later it works without making any change to our settings

Any ideas?

Markus said...

I have a problem, too

the short urls are nor redirecting to the url of the news
you can check it here
http://twitter.com/blurayforum

how can I chnage this?

Anonymous said...

Getting a "404" whenever I try to activate it..

Unknown said...

@Gonzague - we're looking into this and trying to replicate it.

Gonzague said...

Thank you very much Steve. If you need it, I can gather the IDs of a few people experiencing this

Tom Kirkpatrick said...

Steve Olechowski -

How does someone actually get support from a real person at Feedburner?

To put it politely, the Feedburner Help Group is essentially a sham where lots of struggling customers ask lots of questions....but very very few actual answers are provided.

Take a look for yourself. This is the only outlet for support that people have!

My blog subscriber list was mis-handled and perhaps deleted by Feedburner staff.... and I cannot get anyone to return my emails.

All the good work on feature improvement will get you nowhere if you can't simply help people with questions.

Thank you,

Tom Kirkpatrick
tomkirk23@gmail.com

soepGARNAAL said...

The ping feature is lame.. what about a integration with google sitemaps ping?

Unknown said...

I don't even see a Socialize tab on my account

Unknown said...

Working with new twitter account and feed located here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/copperheads twitter account here: http://twitter.com/copperheadwc and only the top item posted to twitter rather than all the new items, which makes me worry that going forward only one item will post each time, is this expected behavior?

Zane Perry said...

This is great and all but creating this feater leaves a larger question. Why do you not apply the goog.le shortener in the RSS feed item.link field??? Right now I import my blog entries to tumblr which is imported into facebook. Unfortunately the tumblr facebook app posts the item.link url under the title. This means that the insanely long url of http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ZanePerryJr/~3/mWp9SFtDtNA/ is posted on my facebook page. Yes, this is a defect of the tumblr facebook application (and I have emailed them as well) but it just makes sense to me that google would use the shortened url in place of the long url everywhere. That to me would be more logical. I am working on a yahoo tube to fix this but it is taking longer then I thought. I was excited when I saw the goog.le url shortener. Maybe soon ;)

Unknown said...

Whomever posted the "Sweep the Leg, Johnny!" entry that found it's way to the screenshot is my new best friend.

churwyn said...

Wow, That's another good reason to tweet..!

Algarve Tour Guide said...

How to integrat multiples feeds in one feed?
other Question: I have some problems to connect whith google frien connect. can you chek if there is anythin wrong

Unknown said...

Great feature! I'd like to tweet my shared Google Reader items in this way, but the note I add to those items is preceded by "Shared by [my name]", which strikes me as way too many characters to add to a tweet. Would love to have more control over exactly what gets pushed to Twitter other than just Title/Body. Thanks.

iHing said...

This is a great feature. Now I do not need to Tweet each of my icrazee Mac blog posts manually. FeedBurner does this for me automatically.

One thing though I would like to see the format of the tweet as Blog Title: Post Title. Example: The iCrazee Mac Blog: Dell PC Laptop vs MacBook Pro.

Jiyugaoka Haikuers Club said...

thank you for your good service. I am using the "Create hash tags from item categories" function.
But it reject underscore"_". It is necessary for Japanese hash tags.
If you can, please change the setting of the function.

Thank you.

Serr8d said...

If you're having problems with feeds to twitter, simply create a bit.ly account, sign in and tweet your posts individually and immediately. You can then 'customize' the twitter message, add hashtags if necessary, AND it's much more personalized than a robot-created tweet.

I usually won't click on a robot-created, twittered URL.

Unknown said...

Thanks so much for this! One thing that has worried me about other services is the downtime they frequently undergo. By moving away from those services, combined with the reliability of goo.gl I feel much more secure. As a Blogger user I appreciate all this integration. Thanks again Google!

CodulRosu said...

A prophecy is the message that has been communicated to a prophet which the prophet then communicates to others. In general, this message can involve divine ...

Anonymous said...

Thanks! One thing that has worried me about other services is the downtime they frequently undergo.

Unknown said...

When I click on the Pingshot option, I do not get an aggregate selection option. I also do not get the scroll down menu in which I can pick other sources to ping. Could anyone explain why I do not have that option? It allows me to activate the feature but nothing more.

lidia.amiga said...

Thanks again Google!

Lidia

Anonymous said...

I have a problem, too

the short urls are nor redirecting to the url of the news

What should I make?

Richard said...

Hi,

I just started using the auto posting to twitter from my feed service. It seems to work for the most part, but I'm noticing that it is skipping articles in the feed.

It'll post several articles, skip a couple, and then continue to post more recent articles.

I've checked feedmedic and see that it is reporting at various times:

"Your server is sending us some non-XML data. This is usually caused by your blogging platform or server generating an error page that is not in a valid feed format (usually it is plain-text, or HTML). Please confirm that your source feed is working properly."

I go to validate my feed and it always comes out as a valid atom feed. So there is nothing for me to fix...

After the errors in feedmedic, it will show an ALL CLEAR message from the same feed 10 minutes later, even though the feed has not been updated within those 10 minutes.

Not sure what is happening there, but I would think that the service, when it succesfully parses the feed, should pick up any article it has not already tweeted, ie. when it had a problem reading the feed previously.

Is this not how the service works?

Thanks,
Rich

Herria Baturik said...

I do not undertand english so well us you, that so much thank for the information and the work all of you done.

Pradeep Maharjan said...

my articles are not updating in twitter. But i can see the updated list in my feed list. My feed is http://peopleboat.com/blog/index.php?format=feed&type=rss


and feedburnder address is http://feeds.feedburner.com/peopleboat/KIbp

while i ping it says following error
Your Ping resulted in an Error "We were unable to process your ping. You must ping with a URL that exactly matches the channel link (RSS) or alternate link (Atom) in your top level feed element pointing back to your website (e.g http://myblog.blogspot.com/), or use your feed URL (e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/myuri)."

DM said...

@ Arif
How about the fact the Feedburner is used by millions of readers worldwide, and as such it is a widely recognised, and therefore FAMILIAR feeder?

Unknown said...

It's not working lately.

I run 4 feeds and have 4 linked twitter accouts (one personal and three work-related) and neither of them is working right now.

All the best. Dena Flows

paul bailey said...

along those lines i was hoping that your the feedburner link splicer would support the shared items in the google reader. this would make a lot of sense as a replacement for delicous, and a way to keep the comments organized in the social media universe.

any plans to do this?

thanks,

paul

Hfetish said...

Am I the only one who can't find the publicize tab anywhere?

http://interior4homes.blogspot.com/ said...

is anyone having a problem with feeds, my feeds are not going on twitter, l think it could be the html being blocked?.

Agung Wiseso said...

feedburner is yhe best

Anonymous said...

Stopped working for me last week. :(

Deactivation/re-activation do not help.

Does not seem to have a way to remove/re-add twitter account.

What do I do?

Dmitry

Unknown said...

@dmitrysotnikov

Simply re-add your twitter account and go through the auth process again with twitter. Yes, just add the twitter account again from the socialize page and press "Save".

This is an issue where OAuth tokens expire between Google and Twitter. It has been fixed but the fix is not in production yet.

cuaryos said...

i don't know what is wrong, i am waiting for couple day but no update in my twitter. it's means no working. by the way thank...

Nick said...

Awesome Feature And very easy to handle.
Thanks.
Emergency preparedness supplies

Anonymous said...

i'm seeking help as to how i can use feedburner with wordpress.com

Anonymous said...

When can we expect to see a Publicize feature for Facebook?

mkg.durgapur said...

I have done! Nice works feedburner!

Unknown said...

Feedburner keeps losing its Twitter authorizations for my feeds. Why?

Unknown said...

When it would be fully functional???? I am facing problems like my posting on twitter automatically gets off.

Unknown said...

sorry for my english.. followers on twitter accounted as feedburner's readers? analogously FriendFeed subscribers.

Auntypizza said...

Same problem as others - I added the wrong Twitter Account and can't for the life f me find where to correct it?

It will have to stay as "unactivated" - ridiculous that I am going round in circles looking for an anser - half an hour already . . . . . . grrrrrrrrr

Jon Lane said...

Stopped working for me too, at least at two out of three of my such accounts. The working feed is webpage > Feedburner > Twitter.

The two that do not work are both in the same second account. One is WP and the other vBulletin. The WP > Feedburner feed works erratically into Facebook too, so I temporarily bypassed it and fed straight through from the source and that's back up and running.

Yes, I've checked all URLs and repinged half a dozen times. No errors. I added a second Google > Twitter authorization. Still nothing.

Not sure what to do but watch and wait.

Anonymous said...

Somebody above who uses wordpress.com says feedburner is useless to him now that wordpress offers internal email subscription and twitter auto post...

but that's not necessarily tru...feedburner is still useful to some of us wordpress.com users who wish to have multiple feeds for our blog (eg. whole posts vs. summaries...i also use google reader to aggregate content i follow, bundle and burn into feed on feedburner, then redirect back to my blog as a supplemental service)

stickyfeet
http://trivcap.wordpress.com

Unknown said...

it shows "server error" anytime i trying to add twitter account to feed

donkissotes said...

great feedburner!!
thank you v much for this

alex said...

Server 500 error occurs every time i'm trying add twitter account to feedburner. please fix it!

Unknown said...

>it shows "server error" anytime i >trying to add twitter account to feed

I can second that. It's not possible to add twitter accounts.

Marilisa said...

Great idea, but it doesn't work. Initially it was updating my Twitter, but now it doesn't work. Please fix- this is a great service, especially with the auto hashtag service.

Unknown said...

@Lars try again now

http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2010/07/fix-applied-for-setting-up-socialize.html

Unknown said...

still the same for me..

on the new window where twitter appears a message will show after pressing accept button: "unable to connect..."

tried it on opera and chrome (latest versions) still the same...

LIS Links said...

It has a bug.
I have a feedburner account with different feed in them, when I link two twitter account with two different feed through socialize tab, the both twitter account was stop updating. Now even i cannot delete my one of the twitter account from the socialize tab. Please do fix this problem.

budi bartim said...

why my feed usualy error?

Anonymous said...

Hi, would be nice to use, but I cannot add a twitter account. The error message being (the well known) server error.

Kveldes said...

Hello very very nice feature !
But i need a little help.
At the begging it works, but now it does not update my twitter,why this happening?
Can u help me to solve this problem?
I try to reputing the twitter account and push the allow access of it but nothing happen.

Unknown said...

Socializing your feed with Twitter is a great way to reech the public. FeedBurner is a great tool .

Unknown said...

FeedBurner is a socialize network marketing places.