Automating your Social Media with RSS Feeds

What are RSS Feeds?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It converts database-driven content (like blog posts) into an XML file that can be read by many services.

Send Blog Posts to FaceBook

There is no need to post new blog posts to Facebook manually. At SPH we use a Facebook App called RSS Graffiti to automatically post our Student Life Blog posts to our Facebook page.

Send Blog Posts to Twitter

The same is true for sending blog posts to Twitter. At SPH we use Twitterfeed to send our Student Life Blog to our Twitter page.

Embed Blog RSS Feeds on a Web Page

Another great thing to do with your blog posts is to have them display on your website. We do this a couple of places on the SPH site.

Our Student Blog page displays recent Student Life blog posts.

Our Current Student page displays recent Student Announcement blog posts.

This is done using a service called Feed2JS. It allows you to enter an RSS feed URL, set your options, and grab the code to put on your web page.

Complete instructions for embedding RSS feeds are available on our Training & Documentation page.

Embed Facebook and Twitter Streams on a Web Page

You can also embed Facebook and Twitter streams right on a web page. At SPH we do this on a few pages of our site.

The Facebook Social Plugins page gives you lots of options for displaying FaceBook content like activity feeds, comments, like buttons, etc.

At SPH we place Facebook Like buttons on our event pages, like this:

The Twitter Widgets page gives you many option for displaying Twitter streams on a web page. You can display a person's stream, a hashtag stream, or a search stream. Here is an example:

Complete instructions are available on our Training & Documentation page.