Just a couple of weeks back, FeedBurner, without much fanfare, stepped into the social arena. As it is with Google, the surprise came as an extremely useful feature: Automatic Tweeting based upon your feed.
Bloggers who use FeedBurner to publish their feeds can immensely benefit from this new addition. It does away with one whole extra step of using a third-party client (or the Twitter website) for publicizing your posts.
How does it work?
Upon publishing a new post…
- FeedBurner immediately grabs your post’s title
- Shortens the post’s URL using goo.gl (another recent introduction)
- Adds any custom messages and hashtags that you’ve set
- And posts it to your Twitter profile
… and the while making sure that the tweet doesn’t exceed 140 characters. Pretty cool ay? If required, it can set set to leave room for retweets too.
The tweeting feature can be setup via the Publicize tab of FeedBurner using this new sidebar item titled Socialize.
If required, tweets can be sent to multiple Twitter accounts. For detailed explanation of individual settings, see here.
Is you ask me, this feature is certainly going to obsolete quite a few WordPress plugins offering similar functionality.
