Here is a possible scenario…

You post an article to your site about a recent arsonist that was arrested in say Faribault, MN. If that post also appeared as a ‘tweet’ on a twitter account someone searching twitter to see if anyone is talking about that arsonist that was arrested in Faribault would arrive on your ‘tweet’ and be referred to your full article on your site via a link thus driving more page views to your publication and possibly acquiring  new frequent visitors.

It’s just one more way for you to get your content in front of more eyes and ears. So with that being said your physical resources may already be stretched, you might not have any room on any of your staff’s plates to add in maintaining a twitter account to their list of tasks. Luckily there’s an easy way to automate all of this and best of all it doesn’t cost you anything.

To begin with here’s a ‘list of materials’ you’ll need in order to accomplish this. Not all are necessarily required, and some you may already have, this is just my ‘best practice’ list. With these tools you’ll be able to automate your twitter account as well as generate useful analytics on the traffic you’re receiving via said twitter account.

1. A website that produces an RSS feed *required
2. A Gmail account (http://www.gmail.com)
3. A Feedburner Account  (http://feedburner.google.com/)
4. A bit.ly account (http://bit.ly)
5. A twitter account (http://twitter.com) *required
6. A twitterfeed account (http://twitterfeed.com) *required

First and foremost you’ll need a website that generates an RSS feed this is absolutely necessary in order to do all of this. Luckily the vast majority of blogging tools such as wordpress, CMSs such as Joomla and Drupal as well as a slew of hosted solutions have this functionality built in already.
The Gmail account you most likely already have if you’re using Google Analytics on your site. If not go ahead and sign up for one. You will need this in order to use Feedburner. By using Feedburner you gain the ability to track how many people are actively subscribing to your rss feeds. So I guess you could say having access to these accounts is optional but I highly recommend using them.

Next up sign up for a bit.ly account, bit.ly is what’s called a URL shortener. It takes the link to your article which could possibly be quite long and condenses it. For example the link to your article might be http://www.mydomainname.com/category/pages/article/article?id=141y42734t7234b234823t423t47023472040b0 when placed into bit.ly a new shorter link is created that points to your original link http://bit.ly/YxImq. The point of all of this is we only have 140 characters at our disposal when using twitter, if your link is giant you don’t have a whole lot of space to describe what the link is. Thankfully the automated mechanism that I’m going to describe later will automatically use a URL shortener to trim down your links. Bit.ly isn’t the only option out there for URL shorteners, in fact there are many, but the reason I recommend bit.ly is that you can view real time statistics on when people are clicking on your links. Again this step is optional, but highly recommended.

Now you’ll need a twitter account, this is obviously required. Try to find an account name that is somewhat similar to your publication, in some situations this may be difficult, twitter account names can be just as hard to come by as unique domain names in some situations.

Last you’ll need a twitterfeed account this is where all the magic will happen in regards of tying your twitter account to your rss feed. Once you have this created we can get started.

So in this tutorial I’m going to try to use a real world example. My employer has a new website called SportsPrepZone that we launched a few weeks ago, it’s a social network devoted to prep sports within the areas that our publications cover. On the front page of this site there are news updates regarding local sporting events. We’d like to create a twitter account to tweet out these updates and give our readers another way to subscribe to our content. It will also provide another path for prospective readers to stumble onto our site.

So I’ve created all of the necessary accounts described above the first thing I’m going to do is copy the link to the sites RSS feed and put it into Feedburner

http://sportsprepzone.com/newsrss.php <–Original RSS Feed

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SportsPrepZone <–Feedburner Feed

To accomplish this go to feedburner.google.com sign in with your google account and there will be a spot that looks like the picture below where you can paste in the link to your rss feed.

Go ahead and hit next and you’ll be prompted to come up with a name for your feed, the title is mainly there to help you identify your feed and the address is what your new feed will appear as once we’re done

Now you can pretty much click next all the way through this until the end but there is another setting that i’d recommend opting into…

Item enclosure downloads is really only useful for podcasts, but tracking clickthroughs on the feed and determining what the reach of the feed are very useful metrics. Now there’s one more step we’ll need to do with feedburner before moving on. You’ll want to click on the title of your feed and then click on the publicize tab then along the left hand side you’ll see an option for awareness api click on that. Now click on active and then save. Once your done setting up your feedburner feed we can move on to twitterfeed.

Go ahead and sign into your twitterfeed account, the first thing we will want to do is link the twitter account. Click on the “Connect your feed your Twitter Account button” from here you will be forwarded to twitter if you’re already logged into your twitter account you will see the image below…

If you’re not signed in to twitter go ahead and do so and you’ll see the image. Go ahead and click allow, this let’s twitterfeed access the account. If successfull you’ll be returned to twitterfeed and you’ll see the message below…

Next up we want to connect our RSS feed, first off you’ll want to give your feed a name this is mainly for identification purposes then you’ll want to enter in the address to your feedburner URL or just your plain RSS feed if you decided to skip the feedburner step. You can click the test feed button to verify that everything is on the up and up with your feed.

You can set how often twitterfeed checks your rss feed for new posts and if it finds them how many does it tweet out at once. I recommend setting the update frequency to 30 minutes since that’s the fastest we can go and to only push out 1 update at a time. In my opinion it seems very spammy when the blogs that I follow spew out a burst of articles at once.

Now we’ll want to enter in your bit.ly account information so we can track stats. You notice bit.ly will be the default option for shortening links. Click on the bit.ly setting link.

To get this information open up another web browser window and log into you bit.ly account. In the top right corner you’ll see a link for account management.

After that on the lefthand side of the screen you see the info we’ll need to put into twitterfeed. Copy and Paste your API Login and the API Key from bit.ly into the appropriate field in twitterfeed.

After that click save feed and congratulations you did it! Going forward all of the articles posted on you site will be sent out as tweets on your twitter account!

By logging into your twitterfeed account you’ll be able to see at a glance you many people are clicking on your links via feedburner and bit.ly

How A Star Works-Link

I already knew that our sun generates it’s heat by fusing hydrogen into helium, but that’s about all I knew of it’s inner workings. This sheds a lot of light on why larger stars burn out faster and why some stars go out super nova style and some go out gracefully. After watching this I guess you could say a star is a chain of fusion reaction and it’s mass dictates how far it will be able to go in terms of building heavier materials.

Kudos to whoever made this!