Home :: Feed.Us Blog :: Promote your site or blog using Twitter

You may have heard of Twitter.  It's a group text messaging service, kinda.  Folks use it to text a group of friends or even as a "microblog" service.

There's a growing trend to use Twitter as a way to publish to mobile users.  News sites and blogs have long used RSS feeds to reach regular readers via feed readers.  Now with the growing use of the iPhone (and of course Blackberry), more folks are reading web content via their mobile phones.

Guy Kawaski's Truemors was one of the first to regularly push website articles to mobile readers via Twitter (see it in action, here). The NY Times has followed, as well as many others.   

You don't need to dig into the Twitter API in order to get this going.  It's actually quite easy to get going.  Recently, Feed.Us helped the PackerBackerBlog.com  start publishing to twitter using Twitterfeed. The PBB has about 200 visitors per day.  With the the Twitter addition, the PBB has added about 20 mobile readers per day. Publishing articles to Twitter has also increased the number of Twitter followers of the PBB.

Here's how it was done:

Twitterfeed takes an RSS feed and publishes it to Twitter using the Twitter API.  Twitterfeed is actually pretty sweet - even though the OpenID login is kind of a pain.   

But you need an RSS feed.  The PackerBackerBlog wanted to publish specific articles that worked well on a mobile phone.  Long stories aren't really ideal.  So using Feed.Us, they built a separate RSS feed that is used in Twitter (using a separate category and then a separate XSL schema.  Sounds complicated, but it's pretty simple). 

Twitterfeed allows you to adjust how often items are sent to Twitter.  Every 3 hours, Twitterfeed checks the new RSS feed for new items, and publishes the headline, the summary and the URL over to Twitter.  Mobile readers get a text message with enough of the story that they can click the link to visit the PBB site directly on their mobile phone.

Using Twitter is a nice little addition that you can try to help promote or reach your visitors where they want to be reached.  Try it out (even if you don't use Feed.Us).

 (Update: we just realized that we should probably build the Twitter API into Feed.Us. Duh!)

(Update again: Kawasaki twitted today: "Twitter generates so much traffic to my site.")

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