This is yet another way to feed your blog posts into Twitter, along with Tweetmeme, Twitterfeed.com and a plug-in called ‘WP to Twitter’.
You should subscribe to Feedburner to activate subscriptions to your blog. Any followers who want to keep an eye on your blogging activities will then be able to receive new posts once they are published, either direct into their search engine readers or as emails into their in-boxes.
The ‘Publicize’ tag makes available a number of extras to help promote your blog, and one of them is called ‘Socialize’ (the highlighted one in the left hand sidebar in the picture below) which allows your new posts to be published in Twitter.
Your Twitter followers will then be able to read your latest blog post, which is automatically tweeted with a shortened link. As you can see at the bottom, you can adapt the tweet with a pre-text message if necessary.
You will need to allow Feedburner to communicate with your Twitter account, and tick the ‘include link’ and ‘leave room for retweets’ boxes. Don’t forget to activate the application, and the job is done!
So why should you feed your posts into Twitter? This increases your blog’s audience through your Twitter followers, therefore exposing it to a higher number of possible subscribers and commenters.
Never be worried about multiple tweets of your blog posts, as Twitter is an ever-moving phenomenon that has continuous traffic (a bit like a train station) that never stands still, so mass tweeting will always catch someone new who is passing by who might just appreciate your post enough to subscribe to your blog.
RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is easily recognisable through the orange square icon found at the top of most blogs’ sidebars.
A search engine reader provides pages with links to newly available posts, or individual ‘cookies’ on the search engine homepage which lists the last three posts of that blog through headline links.
In Facebook the whole post is published in the Notes pages, and your Homepage or Status page shows the headline link (known as a permalink) with perhaps the first few lines of the post as a taster.
RSS is important if you wish to increase your readership or encourage more interest from search engines. It is a piece of software that encourages the search engine spiders to follow your blog, and automatically spreads your news throughout the web. Without it your blog would appear lifeless as only those who are invited would get a chance to read it, and only if they bothered to visit it regularly. RSS automatically delivers your messages without effort, saves time and encourages a new readership, especially through social media.
