Updating your status on social media websites with your blog’s RSS feed is easy, and there are several options to do it. We’ve been experimenting with doing it in different ways, and we’ll be on the lookout for new options that may come along. Here’s how we do it now.
Last.fm and Tumblr are the simplest to set up, since they both have built-in RSS support. On last.fm, you should look for the Artist News link in the Music Manager menu. On Tumblr, click Customize, then Services and set “Automatically import my RSS feed” as “links with summaries”. Update: Tumblr no longer supports RSS, we use the Tumblrize WordPress plugin now instead.
On Facebook, there are several applications that let you send your blog’s RSS feed to your band’s Facebook page. Our favorite so far is RSS GRaffiti. It lets you add multiple RSS feeds, which is great if your blog is bilingual, like this one. Social RSS has the same functionality, but it limits the number of weekly posts to 3, unless you subscribe, while RSS Graffiti has no such limitations. It is also possible to update your Facebook group with your RSS feed. We use the Networked Blogs application for this.
As for Twitter, MySpace, and a lot of other social media websites, the easiest option is updating via Ping.fm. Ping.fm, which has nothing to do with Apple’s iTunes Ping, lets you configure your login credentials for the social media websites you wish to update, and then you can set your blog feed URL under Services/Tools. This way you can send the blog post title and the link only, which is enough for us, but if you also want an excerpt included, try Hootsuite or Twitterfeed. We tried Hootsuite, but it updated very slowly, and recently they also started inserting ads (sponsored tweets) in their free users’ RSS feeds to Twitter, so we quit.
It is also possible to update some social media sites with others, such as syncing MySpace updates with Twitter and Facebook, but we’d recommend doing this in a centralized way instead to avoid loops.