RSS feeds are useful in many ways. Not only do they allow your website browsers to easily stay updated with your latest info, they are also the easiest way to easily and swiftly send your content elsewhere.

By setting up our RSS feeds to flow into our social media accounts, we can automatically inform all our fans/subscribers/contacts of our new content. In the last post, we looked at how we can combine RSS feeds to make one overall ‘me’ feed which we then used to populate our Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. In this post, we’re going to look at how we can easily turn our latest published article into a tweet.

There are many ways to use an RSS feed to populate a Twitter account, but my favourite method is to use Feedburner.

What Is Feedburner?

Feedburner is an RSS feed management tool that started life way back in 2004. Since then, it has been acquired by Google and now forms part of their free service suit to Google Members. Feedburner adds a range of extended features to your website or blog feed and also comes with a useful analytics package allowing you to easily see how many feed subscribers you have and what parts of your feed they click on. To setup your RSS feed within Feedburner, simply browse to http://feedburner.google.com and login with your Google username and password. Enter your normal RSS feed address and click ‘next’.

Feedburner will give you a new url for your RSS feed. You should now replace the feed link on your website or blog with this new Feedburner url. If you are using WordPress, you can download the Feedburner plugin to help you do this here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedburner-plugin/

Once you have setup your new Feedburner RSS feed, log back into your Feedburner account and do the following:

1. Click on your feed name on the Feedburner welcome screen.

2. Click on ‘Publicize‘ on the top tab navigation.

3. Click on ‘Socialize‘ under the ‘Services’ options located on the left hand side of the ‘Publicize’ screen (see image)

4. Click on ‘Add A Twitter Account‘ and enter your Twitter username and password to authorise Feedburner to post to your Twitter profile.

5. Further down, under ‘Formatting Options‘, I recommend you;

• set ‘post content’ to ‘title only’
• tick ‘include link’
• tick ‘leave room for retweets’
• order items by ‘publish date’

The above will now allow Feedburner to publish all of your latest website or blog updates straight to your twitter account. Overall, a great way to direct (and track) your Twitter followers to your new content instantly!

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Google likes social media. And if Google likes something, it’s generally a good idea for SEOs to like it too. From my experiences, building links through social media channels is now becoming increasingly important for ranking pages and driving more traffic.

I believe that the true benefit of building lots of links from social media sources is that it helps Google to validate your site as ‘useful’ to internet browsers and hence literally ‘worth’ ranking. In other words, it seems to me that social exposure is one of the more important ways Google tries to decide whether a website currently attracting lots of new links is actually worth ranking highly. Now this I admit is very much an SEO view of social media, so for those of you who would like to read a more ‘sales’ orientated view of social media, try this blogpost here.

Back to the SEO. So how do you go about building links from social media sources? Here are a few of the best ways to start:

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is the process by which internet browsers save webpages for quick access later. Bookmarking began life as the ‘save to favourites’ option we all became familiar with within Internet Explorer. Thesedays services like Delicous, Faves and Yahoo Bookmarks allow the browser to save their favourite webpages and access their personal ‘favourites’ from any computer with internet access.

Creating social bookmarks to your webpages is a quick and effective way to build lots of backlinks. Because it is such a quick method of building links you might also want to bookmark any links that you get from other higher authority sources too, eg ezinearticles.com or a high pagerank PR release site.

There are many social bookmarking sites out there so choose one or two to start with, perhaps Delicious and Faves would be good starting points. Once you get the hang of them then sign up to as many as you want, perhaps using a service such as Social Marker (we covered Social Marker in this past last year http://www.coffeekicks.com/play-upfront-with-seo) which enables you to build links from a large number of bookmarking sites without having to visit them all individually.

You should also add a bookmarking button to your own pages to encourage visitors to bookmark your content when browsing your site, there are many available online and one is even offered by Social Marker.

Social News Sites

News sites like Kirtsy, Digg, Mixx and Reddit are another good source of social media links. On such sites other users vote for your webpage and your collective votes reflect how many browsers are enjoying your webpage at any given moment. As a result, pages posted on news sites tend to be reflective of current headlines, trends and questions or offer a new slant on a known theme. Outside of any SEO benefit,pages well liked on social news sites can often bring a boatload of traffic on their own. If you attract enough votes to get onto a featured page then you will also benefit from some very high PR page links, even if these links are only short lived!

Twitter

Tweeting and ‘Retweeting’ are two of the big buzzwords of the last 2 years. Not enough people take advantage of the fact that browsers can also tweet their appreciation of your webpage directly from the webpage itself.  This is enabled by the simple inclusion of some Twitter html code (available from the tools page of your twitter account). The trick of course is to publish content that most easily encourages as many retweets as possible. Again, having links to your site tweeted and retweeted offer another form of powerful social media backlink.

There are a number of commentators who offer good advise on attracting tweets and retweets, here are a couple to start with:

http://www.socialtechnologyreview.com/articles/retweets-how-get-your-message-retweeted

http://twittertips.org/how-to-get-more-people-to-retweet-you-on-twitter.html

Facebook ‘Likes’

The Facebook ‘Like’ feature is very similar to the Tweet/Retweet button and offers a quick and easy way for people to share your pages to their Facebook network.

For further reading on the Facebook Like feature check out these articles:

http://www.musicmarketingmanifesto.com/facebook-likes-part-2/

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6298/Facebook-Explains-How-To-Get-More-Likes-and-Clicks.aspx

Start Using Social Media to Build Links

If you start to use any of these methods to build social media links to your webpages, you will easily see that building such links on your own proves difficult. Furthermore, to gain full SEO benefit from social media links it makes sense to find ways to attract lots of bookmarks, tweets and likes from many separate social media accounts.

Hence, it’s a good idea to get a team in place to help you. By building a social media team composed of friends, employees or associates you will be able to get both a lot more social media exposure and a lot more links.

Additionally, there are now a growing number of social media services like ‘Twiends’ which seek to grow both your social media accounts and exposure.

It’s been a changing time in the world of SEO and as online marketeers we too have to change with it. SEO is no longer ‘just’ about link building in the traditional sense, Google now seeks to look to social media to ensure that all those sites we SEO types are building links to are worthy of those links and any related ranking. Hence, SEO should now look to include an element of social media link building within any campaign.

Overall, focus on creating high-quality content. This is especially true of the last three social media link types (social news, facebook and twitter) where the best content really does win through. Content is what drives social media and, now more than ever before, SEO.

Removing Spam From Twitter Leads Sourced By Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is a fantastic tool for searching Twitter for conversations and leads relevant to your business.

I run a wee hotel comparison website and Twitter is a good source of leads. I use Tweetdeck to run searches for tweets on ‘hotels london’, ‘hotels new york’ etc. Travel is huge on Twitter and when I started using Tweetdeck,  one of my big problems was that I had to browse through lots of competitors posting their tweets for cheap rooms here, there and everywhere before I got to the potential customer tweeting some version of ‘does anyone know any good websites for finding cheap rooms in London?’

A simple way I’ve found to filter out almost all of the tweets I don’t want is to use a lil twitter language in the search string posted in Tweetdeck. Instead of asking Tweetdeck to search for ‘hotels london’, I ask it to search for ‘hotels london -http’

The ‘-http’ removes any tweet from your list that has a weblink within it. 99% of tweets with links come from competitors, spam or individual hotels looking to attract Twitter traffic themselves. Overall, tweets with links tend to be ‘answers’ not ‘questions’. When your looking for leads, you’re looking for ‘questions’.

So, filter out the links from your Tweetdeck searches and you’ll be left with (almost) pure ‘questions’ which are almost all ‘leads’.