Earlier today I was was speaking to my friend, alliance family member and (brand new!) witness @c0ff33a. He noticed that my steemit posts automatically post to twitter and facebook without me needing to do anything. He mentioned wanting to figure out how to do that for himself and I realised, "I bet a lot of people still don't know how to do that!"
So I figured I would write up a quick and straight forward tutorial to get you all started.
Setting up an RSS Feed
Setting up your RSS Feed is your first step. This used to be done simply through streemian but as their services shut down a new method had to be found. Quite simply all you need is this URL:
http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/extract.php?url=https://steemit.com/@XXXXX&in_id_or_class=articles__h2+entry-title&url_contains=
Replace XXXXX with your user name. It will provide you with an RSS feed of your 5 most recent posts.
Lets clean this up though as the url is kind of a mouthful.
Go to www.feedburner.google.com and sign up. It's free! Chances are you already have an account if you use gmail. The first screen you see will be this:
The area I have circled is where you paste your url we made earlier and click next. Then you fill out the rest of the form you are presented with, give it a name and a handy custom url:
Click "Save Feed Details". Ok so now you have a nice tidy RSS Feed URL .. AND the benefit of analytics which feedburner provides.. should you want that.
So as you can see, my rss URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/fiftysixnorth
Go ahead and open that in a new tab and see what it looks like.
Using Zapier to automatically post to Twitter and Facebook
Zapier is an online service that takes RSS feeds and performs automated actions whenever it detects an update to the selected RSS feed. So go to https://zapier.com/ and sign up. It's a free service up to 100 'zaps' a month (which means you can comfortably use it for either 3 posts per day going to 1 place (say twitter) or 1 post per day going to 3 different places.
So I post once per day and it automatically goes to both twitter and Facebook. The process for setting them up is almost identical so I will focus here on just twitter.
Step 1 - From the main page on the site once logged in click the big red button labelled "Make a Zap".
Step 2 - On the next screen give you 'zap' a name and choose your trigger app.. I am pointing at two places here but if you've never used Zapier before the rss trigger app will only appear in that built in app menu at the bottom.
Step 3 - Select your trigger.. here just click on "New item in Feed" then save + continue.
Step 4 - Copy/Paste your RSS Feed URL into the top box and click continue.
Step 5 - Next it will ask you to pull in samples... which means it tests your feed and then pulls out sample data it will use to help build the next part of this feed through.
Select one of the samples and press continue.
Step 6 - Now you select your action app, this time we choose twitter.
Step 7 - For an action select "create a tweet".
Step 8 - Now you you have to link through to your twitter account.. its very straight forward.. just follow the directions.
Step 9 - Next setup your template, I went with title and link as you can see below. You select the options best suited to you from a drop down.
Next you test that everything works.. and when you are satisfied save and make sure to turn the ZAP you just created on so its working!
NOTE: if gathering the samples step doesnt work or the final testing doesnt work then it could be your RSS is down, i've had it a few times where feedburner was having issues..but overall its pretty rare :) Just come back and try again later or use the initial rss url that we used to make the feedburner url.. you just wont have any analytics to play with.
Follow the same process if you want to connect to facebook.
I hope you find this helpful .. now go forth and fill your twitter feeds with your steemit posts :)
Thanks for Looking.
Follow me and read more of my posts here: @fiftysixnorth
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