How I combine Twitter, blog and RSS

I have used Twitter for about one month now and I have checked out most of the Twitter tools there are. A good source for tools is http://twitter.pbwiki.com and another one is http://justtweetit.com/tweeter-directory On the right side under the ads you will find a list of tools and other stuff for Twitter. I started this blog almost at the same time as Twitter. Now, the question is how to combine Twitter, my new blog, RSS-links and other links that I publish. It is a lot of saving, cutting and pasting just to get it out to Twitter and to get it to my blog. I will share with you what I learned so far. I welcome any comments about even better methods and tools!

Here are my tools:

1. Twitter
2. TweetDeck
3. Tweetburner (twurl)
4. Twitterfeed
5. Google Reader
6. Diigo and Delicious
7. My blog – this blog

They are all free and work excellent together and I will tell you how!

The Twitter suit

In Twitter I mainly posts links to news or interesting stuff that I find during my surfing. Of course I also use links in my blog posts. The following tools are, among other things, for handling my links integrated with Twitter and my blog.

TweetDeck is the tool to use if you follow more than 50 people. It is almost impossible to use the standard interface and read all the tweets rolling down the list. In TweetDeck, I can arrange the people I follow in groups. I have the groups:

• Inner circle – my collegues and “physical friends”. 
• Fav’s – My favourites of the people I follow. Currently I have @mashable,  @patrickdixon,  @JamesRivers,  @the_gman and some more.
• TechWatch - people twittering stuff useful for my work.
• I also use temporary groups.
• A search can also be used in the same way as a group. For instance I have a search on “Location Based” that continuously is updated with tweets matching that.

Tweetburner is a service that shorten your web-address from its original long form to something shorter such as  http://twurl.nl/m4hh0z (this blog). In Tweetburner you can also see how many that clicked at your link. First set TweetDeck to use the right shortener. You will find it after the “Shorten URL” field. A long list of different services that can shorten your URL’s. Select twurl that is the one connected to Tweetburner.
Now, if you post a link in TweetDeck by first paste it into the “Shorten URL” field and press the Shorten button you will see the short form show up. Fill in your own text and press enter. After a while you can log in to http://Tweetburner.com and get the statistics of how many that clicked your link and when!

Twitterfeed is a tool that automatically can create Tweets from any RSS-feed. All news pages and blogs these days have a RSS-feed. Just take a look in http://alltop.com if you don’t have a clue where to find them!
You can let Twitterfeed use your favorite RSS-feed and put them out on Twitter. You can filter on certain words and you can set the frequency and Twitterfeed will work by itself.
I am not so found of just relaying out a RSS-feed and not knowing what will come. I want to control the feed by myself. This is where Google Reader, Diigo and Delicious comes in!

The RSS and Bookmarks suit

Google Reader is a RSS-reader (you can probably do the same with any RSS reader). I subscribe to the RSS feeds that I find interesting. Select from Alltop.com for instance. One neat function in Google Reader is that you can publish the items that you like just by clicking the Share-button when you read the RSS item. All the links that you share will be published on a webpage that is created for you. Click at the Share folder and you will see the link to the webpage with shared items. That page is also a RSS feed! Use that RSS-feed in Tweetfeeder.com

Diigo and Delicious are two different services to save your bookmarks on a server. They have numerous features, such as tagging and sharing with your friends, that I will not talk more about here. You don’t need to use both of them. I have my own reason to do that. See my previous blog-post Twine or Delicious? The answer is Diigo for more. Lets focus on Diigo for now. Install the add-on to Firefox for Diigo (other web browsers have similar features) From Diigo you can produce RSS-feeds for Twitterfeed as well. For instance when you save a bookmark you can fill in tags. You can use the tag publish or any tag you want for publishing. In Diigo this tag will have its own RSS-feed. Click on the tag in Diigo and you will get the RSS-feed. Just give it to Twitterfeed and it will be published the way you want. When you save a bookmark in Diigo you will get the option to send to Twitter. I normally don’t use this because I want the twurl shortener and not the one Diigo uses. You also have the option in Diigo to set comments and send it to your blog as a draft. This is very useful and can be the base for a future blog-post!

Finally, my blog – this blog. From the feature in Diigo that I mentioned above I will have a bunch of drafts with comments and a links. I can mix them as I like and get ideas to new blog-posts. Whenever I publish a new bog-post I also post a tweet in order to inform about it. Be careful to not only promote your own blog because your followers will eventually disappear. Tweet helpful links and other stuff and the tweets about your own blog will come natural.

I often post in Twitter manually with copy and paste to TweetDeck and that is no problem but with the methods mentioned above I get a continuous flow of tweets based on bookmarks that I think is interesting and would like to save anyway.

I hope that you can pick up something from all this and use it in a way that suites you. Please let me know if you have some other methods and tools!

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