Feeds: Automatic Tweets with Feedburner

As bloggers we put a lot of time and effort into our blogs. There's nothing worse than putting in the work, then not having anyone view it. If you want readers, you've got to publicize your work. In recent years Twitter has become an incredibly powerful tool for connecting with readers and growing a following. It's a place to socialize, publicize and sometimes just have a little fun sharing interesting things in 140 characters or less. Twitter is a vital tool in today's blogging world and if you're not using it you should be.

Publicize on Twitter with Feedburner
Feeds are an excellent way to provide content to a large number of people in an accessible format. Feedburner under the banner of Google adds several feed customizations not in the standard blog feed. Among other things, Tweets to publicize all of your new content are a key feature. Setup is easy and the reach powerful, but first your blog should be setup with Feedburner.

Set Up Automatic Tweets
Start by logging into your Feedburner Account then select the feed you'd like publicized. Click on the Publicize tab and selected Socialize. Now it's time to configure the feed for automatic tweets. The screen looks like this:

Twitter Account - This account tweets updates. Add your account, then Feedburner does the rest.

Formating Options - Post Content determines how a tweet is built,  Title only keeps it short. Check Include Link so a tweet leads readers back to the blog post. Check Leave room for retweets so others can easily share a tweet. Hash Tags are important to expanding an audience, using Categories and Lables is a good way to go. Check Use inline hash tags to keep tweets brief. Add Additional text to each tweet for a standard look. Consider adding the Blog Title and the authors name.
 
Item Selection - These options limit tweets for bulk posters primarily. If you post several items at once, it's a good idea to limit tweets to avoid spamming followers. The keyword filter is an interesting feature, this allows only specific types of posts to be tweeted.



Sample Item Preview
Here you get a glimpse of how tweets go out. Adjusting options above to find the right look.

Once the configuration looks good, activate or save changes. Now, each new post you make to the blog gets tweeted based on these settings. No extra work, just an easy connection back to your readers.

Conclusion
Publicizing posts is an important part of blogging and Feedburner allows you to automatically connect with followers through Twitter. It also publicizes your content to the world helping grow your readers. Utilizing these tools can help get your blog visitors, all you have to do now is post quality content to build a following.

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