April 24th, 2009 by Michelle Moore

#followfriday cont’d- the folks @conjunctured, @nabbit, @twibs, @stanleytang, @austintweetups, @r, @sarahrobinson

April 22nd, 2009 by Michelle Moore

For me, the realization came after noticing that one particular person I followed seemed to Tweet 200 times a day and ALL the tweets were relevant, timely, and COOL. ” Who has this kind of time?”

No one does. But they have tools.

Be warned, the following practice is not to be entered into lightly! It’s really easy to cross the line from informative info stream to senseless spamming. If you are building a reputation as a personal-touch sort of personality, this may actually damage your online reputation. Choose your tactics with care. However, if you have some secret aresenal of blog content, RSS feeds that you never miss, sources of info that are so cutting edge that you wish you could tell everyone to read them… well, here’s how you do exactly that using your Twitter account and become a resource-beacon among the tweet traffic.

First, choose four of your bestest, most favoritest RSS feeds ever… not your own blogs, but other people’s feeds. Do you have a link to an awesome Photoshop site that’s so far off the beaten path that no one knows about it? Is there a trend feed in your iGoogle dashboard that’s instrumental in helping you plan your marketing strategy? Did you promise your followers that you would inform them of anything having to do with Emperor Penguins?(hint: use a Google Alert on this one.)  Choose carefully and don’t overdo it.

Second, set up an account with TwitterFeed.com for your Twitter account. Once your TwitterFeed account is established, you then have the ability to tell it what RSS feeds you want to keep track of, how often to check it, and how many posts you want to pull at a time. As you put this info in, you can also choose a URL shortener, which I simply find amusing. All of my feeds use different URL shorteners, just cuz I can. You can also chose whether to show titles only, descriptions only, or however much of both will fit in a Tweet.  You can also preface each feed with something, like “Reading Newsletters:” or “From the PSGuru” to indicate that what follows is not originating with you, but is info you want to share from another resource. Don’t mislead the Tweeps by pretending that this is all your wisdom.

Third,  sit back and monitor your feeds. Do Not Forget This Step! If you make a mistake in the frequency or number of topics you grab, you can easily annoy the bejeezus out of everyone who’s following you and destory your follower list.

Fourth, and optional, if you use Wordpress, install the TwitterTools plug in. Not only do you get sidebar widget Twitter list capability for your blog, this tool will also re-cap all your tweets for the week and post them in a blog new article for you. This gives you a nice, easy way to summarize for extra blog content, and an easy way for you review the info stream you’re sending out and see if it needs modification (remove that feed, reduce the number of articles, increase the frequency, whatever).

I should also mention that TwitterFeed is not the ONLY way to accomplish this tactic. Other tools out there accomplish the same thing, like the RSS feed organizer in HootSuite but this is pretty much all TwitterFeed does, so fails are less likely, and it keeps things simple for someone who’s just getting their feet wet.

Now, go forth and inform responsibly!