There are lots of places you can get free RSS feeds, and you can use tools to get the information from them onto your social media accounts, automatically or manually.
But first, what exactly IS an RSS feed?
Put simply, an RSS feed is a way to present the information on a website in a standardised format. When you look at a website, the information on it can be formatted in lots of ways. This makes it hard for a computer program (such as a search engine like Google) to understand what is on the page. But when an RSS feed is created that stores that information in a standardised format, it can quickly and easily be read by other programs, because they know what to expect, and where to find what they need.
For this reason, a lot of websites create RSS feeds so that programs running on other sites can access the information easily. They WANT other sites, like search engines and other online tools to be able to read and use the information they contain. Often these RSS feeds are not made public, and are only submitted to search engines or other sites privately. But very often, there is a link to the RSS feed right there on the site, pretty much asking people like you to use it.
And here are some ways you can do just that, to make your social media accounts go viral…
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If you have a special area of interest, or even just like to tweet about news that happens in your part of the world, you can get RSS feeds of news from Google Alerts.
Go to http://google.com/alerts and log into your Google account. In the box “Create an alert about”, enter the search term you want to create a feed about. Click the “Show Options” drop-down, and fill in your choices, making sure you put Deliver To as “RSS feed”. Click Create Alert, and you will get the address of your RSS feed.
This will be updated whenever anything appears on Google that match your search criteria and options.
Then go to http://ifttt.com and create an account, or log in if you already have one. If you haven’t already done so, you need to add your Twitter account into ifttt. To do that, click on your username in the top right corner, then click on Services. Filter to find Twitter, and add your Twitter account.
Also on Services, you need to add your feed. Filter to find “Feed”, then add the URL of your feed.
Then create an Applet (rule) that will trigger every time the feed is updated, to send out a tweet to your Twitter account.
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You can find the rss feeds of a magazine or newspaper or another site that has information you and your followers are interested in, and have that posted on a WordPress blog and then on Facebook (either on your timeline or on a page you own).
Go to the site of your newspaper, and look for the RSS symbol. You might find it in the top of the site, or in the links in the footer. Not all sites will have it.
As an example, the site USA Today has several feeds. They are at http://www.usatoday.com/rss/ . You might, for example, be interested in golf, and there you will find a feed of golf-related news from USA Today (http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/UsatodaycomGolf-TopStories
To have the information in the feed post automatically to your WordPress blog, you can use the free plugin RSS Post Importer https://wordpress.org/plugins/rss-post-importer/ .
Then, using the WP plugin Jetpack, https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/ , use the Publicize feature to have the blog posts sent to Facebook (and/or Twitter, or other social media sites) automatically.
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If you have a WordPress site that sells stuff, and is updated regularly (even automatically, like if you use an Amazon plugin for example), you can use the feed from that site to promote automatically on Instagram whenever you add something to it.
The RSS feed of your WordPress site is probably at http://yoursite.com/feed . This will give you the feed for your posts. If you want a special post type, such as products, try http://yoursite.com/feed?post_type=product (this works for WooCommerce – might be different if you are using another cart plugin on WP).
Then go to http://ifttt.com and create an account, or log in if you already have one. If you haven’t already done so, you need to add your Instagram account into ifttt. To do that, click on your username in the top right corner, then click on Services. Filter to find Instagram, and add your Instagram account.
Also on Services, you need to add your feed. Filter to find “Feed”, then add the URL of your feed.
Then create an Applet that will trigger every time the feed is updated, to send out a picture to your Instagram account. Instagram doesn’t allow links within the posts, so make sure you have a link to your site on the account, so people can find you – and BUY! Or you can put a non-clickable link within the post description.
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Very often, people are very strong in one of the social media platforms, and run out of steam when it comes to posting on others.
If Twitter is your strong point, you can use the feed from your Twitter account to send your tweets to other platforms automatically.
To find your Twitter feed, go to
https://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=
You need to put your Twitter username after the = at the end, so for example my Twitter feed (from my Twitter account http://twitter.com/christineabela ) is at https://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=christineabela
Once you have this feed, you can use ifttt to automatically post these to whatever social media accounts you want to. So you could post your tweets to a Facebook page, for example.
Or you could build a new Facebook page very quickly by posting the tweets from other people whom you admire (be careful about copyright and check if you think you need their permission before using other peoples’ content).
Or you can again use ifttt, or the WordPress plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/rss-post-importer/ to take that Twitter feed and create posts on a WordPress blog.
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Another way to use Twitter rss feeds is to get a feed of tweets that use a certain search term.
To do this, use
https://twitrss.me/twitter_search_to_rss/?term=
and put your search term at the end.
For example, if you want a feed of tweets about golf, use
https://twitrss.me/twitter_search_to_rss/?term=golf
If your search term has more than one word, you will need to put a “+” symbol in where the space would be, for example
https://twitrss.me/twitter_search_to_rss/?term=golf+courses
will give you a feed of tweets about “golf courses”.
This is a super powerful way to get a whole lot of content very quickly about one topic, from a wide variety of sources. AND, depending on the topic, it will be updated very very often.
If you want to post this on a WordPress blog, you might want to make the posts “draft” status and manually check them before they are published, because you might find there are some off-topic or off-colour content that sneaks through.
Special unannounced BONUS!!
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Of course, if you have RSS Masher, you can create a super feed with lots of feeds from multiple places, including Twitter RSS feeds, that are all about one topic.
Let’s take our golf example again. With RSS Masher, you can mix together the USA Today golf news feed, a Twitter topic feed on golf, a feed from your own golf website (and whatever else you like that the search feature within RSS Masher finds for you), and create a super feed about golf.
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Use the Ping feature within RSS Masher to alert the search engines about your wonderful feed, and all of a sudden your website (or whatever it was of yours that you sneaked into the feed) gets a ranking boost because it is now associated with so many great high-authority sites on the same topic.
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And you have a wonderful reservoir of content that is continually updating, that you can use to feed into a Facebook page about golf (or wherever you need it to go). Or use it to set up a WordPress site with great current content about your topic of choice, using the Export to WordPress feature in RSS Masher. And keep the site up to date using the RSS post importer plugin or ifttt.
Then of course you will use the feed from that WordPress site to make a link out to a Facebook page or Twitter account or Instagram or wherever you want it to go. All on autopilot.
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And don’t forget that RSS Masher can get you an RSS feed of your YouTube channel, or a YouTube playlist. So you can add that into any of the above, creating automated embeds on a website for all your videos, automated syndication to social media whenever you upload a new video, and more.
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Plus. don’t forget that you can, when you set up your feed in RSS Masher, add a link into every post to wherever you want it to go to. Like to your site, or an affiliate link, or whatever you are wanting to promote.
So what are you waiting for? Get RSS Masher now. Click here.
