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SMF RSS and Twitter

Started by skadamo, March 12, 2009, 12:24:54 PM

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skadamo

Found a decent way to promote my site on twitter.

1) Create a Twitter Account. http://twitter.com/ [nofollow]
2) Grab your sites RSS for your forum.  I recommend topics only (sa=News) but it's up to you.  see: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=25009.0;wap2 for tips on SMF RSS.
3) Goto http://twitterfeed.com/ [nofollow] and pipe the RSS to your twitter account.
4) Start following anyone who mentions keywords related to your sites subject by searching http://search.twitter.com [nofollow]

I took it a step further and aggregate all of my SMF sites using Drupal and then send that to a twitter acount.
Examples:
http://twitter.com/korider [nofollow] (SMF / Twitterfeed)
http://twitter.com/WringIt [nofollow] (Drupal Aggregation of SMF / Twitterfeed)

Anyone else doing something similar?  Any better ideas?

If you are into SMF, powersports and motorcycles follow me up!  http://twitter.com/skadamo [nofollow]



skadamo

After I posted this I was thinking.  If you are concerned with retaining followers you may want to limit the number of tweets at any given time.  > 3 at a time is probably a bad idea.  Too much of a good thing for your followers.

bosmolskate

Interesting approach.  have you seen a large increase of web traffic to your site using these techniques?

ApplianceJunk


skadamo

:D not many referrals with this method so far.  Maybe a dozen in the last few weeks.

But, it is easy to implement.

Once more people understand Twitter I will be interested to see if this changes.


walker

I've been using friend feed to rebroadcast the forum feed to twitter

works well except for when the forum gets spammed

then my twitter feed does too


sure wish there was a good working akismet mod for 1.1.8'


@Occasion2B



skadamo

Checked out FriendFeed, like that too, thanks.

As an update, twitter is now the #1 referrer (with 74 referrals) for a small site of mine.  http://electricmotorcycleforum.com [nofollow] Twitter account is http://twitter.com/ElectricRiders [nofollow] if you want to take a look.

Anyone else having success?

Dzonny


Drover

I'm trying to do exactly what you are but TwitterFeed is saying it can't parse my feed.  Feed validaotr says:

QuoteIt looks like this is a web page, not a feed. I looked for a feed associated with this page, but couldn't find one. Please enter the address of your feed to validate.

Here's my feed: http://www.twittertycoons.com/forum/index.php?action=.xml;sa=recent;limit=1;type=rss2

I tried RSS, Atom, etc. but none of them work.

Any idea what the problem is?.  :(

TheDisturbedOne

I should start doing this...
Somebody reply to this so that I'll remember.

Vekseid

I just realized how potentially awesome this could be if I piped it to my roleplaying forums...
Adult Role Playing Forums - - Over five million posts - - Elliquiy's LAMP configuration (maybe NSFW)

Blog about Forums and Servers - - Twenty things to make Simple Machines Forum go faster

Private/Instant Message requests for free support will be ignored.

Drover

Maybe the problem is that some of the boards are not open to guests?

Vekseid

Gated communities are like that : )

I'll figure something out eventually.
Adult Role Playing Forums - - Over five million posts - - Elliquiy's LAMP configuration (maybe NSFW)

Blog about Forums and Servers - - Twenty things to make Simple Machines Forum go faster

Private/Instant Message requests for free support will be ignored.

Drover

Quote from: Vekseid on June 01, 2009, 09:27:29 AM
Gated communities are like that : )

"Gated Communities"...I like that.  Well ya gotta keep out the riff raff somehow.  ;)


Justyne

interestitng idea. might have to try that
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

ohdearie54

hello, i have found that promoting your smf forum on twitter destroys your real numbers of visitors (Users Online) as you get lots of "visitors" automatically following you.

also someone is using the rss feed to twitter my forum. whilst i am flattered it means that i am getting 30 or 40 people automatically appearing on the forum for every post and showing up on the "Users Online" count.

i now dont have a clue what sort of visitor stats i am actually getting :(

does anyone know how to
1)  stop it when i twitter links to my forum posts
2) stop it when people follow rss feed?

thanks

Arantor

Disabling the RSS feed from Admin > News and Newsletters wouldn't hurt but really once it's started it isn't going to stop much.

ohdearie54

thanks for your help with that :)

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