How To Use Zapier and Feedly To Bring An Aggregated Feed Into Twitter

Hello again, Derek here,

Today I’m going to show you how to use Feedly and Zapier to pull aggregated RSS feeds diresctly into your Twitter timeline. But, before I do that, let me just give you a bit of background as to why this is needed. After all, wouldn’t it be a lot easier just to pull the RSS feed straight in? Well, of course it would, but Twitter decided they didn’t like people doing that!

How I Found Out Twitter Had Banned Direct RSS Feeds

But, to start with let’s go back to the beginning of how I found this out. So, a few months back I wanted to re-invigorate my social media strategy.

So, I got into some training from my Online Marketing mentor Paul O’Mahony as to how I should do this. One of the things he teaches is to become an “information broker” and one of the techniques is to use authority figures in your market and share their information. He suggested using Hootsuite or Buffer and taking their RSS feeds directly into your Twitter feed.

Great idea I thought, until, I came to try it. I tried it through Hootsuite and a couple of other social media aggregator softwares but just couldn’t get it to work.

Research Time

So, I did a bit of digging and found that Twitter had banned the use of RSS feeds directly into your Twitter feed. Now I have to say I think this is a bit short-sighted. Let’s face it the Internet is all about sharing information. And, if say, Neil Patel or Ryan Deiss share information that I think would be useful to my subscribers and customers, I am going to want to share it. Why I can’t do that in an automated fashion to save time is beyond me. However, Twitter decided such activity was degrading the value of the timeline. It’s their ball and we have to play by their rules, no matter how stupid I might think the rule is!

So, I had to find a workaround. As it happens I decided to use Feedly and Zapier, although I think you can do this with IFTTT as well. I did a post on IFTT a while back which you can find by clicking this link.

The bottom line, though, is I think this is a neater and tidier way to do it, so I made a video to show you how it works.

The thing I like about using Feedly and Zapier is that, firstly, Feedly allows you to aggregate all of yur favorite blogs into one feed. And secondly, the output allows for all of the content on all of the RSS feeds to be taken into your Twitter timeline.

The Downside Of Using Feedly And Zapier

The one downside is that you only have the ability to write one Tweet, so you are going to have a lot of tweets that say the same thing on your timeline. But, Twitter wanted to increase the quality of the content I hear you cry. Indeed they did! They seem to have forgotten about the possibilities of cause and effect here 🙂

One thing I have come to understand about Online Marketers is that they are a resourceful bunch if nothing else. Clearly there would be easy workaround, so they might as well just have left things be. But, hey, ours is not to wonder why!

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