Feedburner Socialize Service (Push RSS to Twitter)

Lately I have had a lot of frustrations regarding Feedburner regarding the way they randomly drop my subscription counts.  On any given day my subscription counts can drop from somewhere in the 900’s to the 300’s for no apparent reason. 

Most of the lost subscriptions can usually be tracked back to FriendFeed but after going back and forth w/ Google (Feedburner) about this issue, I am confident the problem itself doesn’t lie w/ FriendFeed, instead I think it’s something Feedburner has an issue with.  Also, I am not alone w/ this issue, I have had several people contact me stating the exact same thing.  Hopefully one day soon Feedburner will get this worked out.

Now that I have bashed Feedburner, I am going to go ahead and go on record and give them credit for doing something pretty cool.  They have a new service for Feedburner users called Socialize that allows you to input your burned feeds into Twitter.  Previously if you wanted to do this you had a wide variety of plugins to chose from, some of which like Twitme are somewhat problematic (especially since wordpress 2.9 was released). 

With the Socialize service inside of Feedburner, you can configure your settings to push your RSS feed onto Twitter, which eliminates the need for additional plugins.  Here’s some more information about the settings you can control w/ Socialize if you are interested:

Select Account (Handles Multiple Accounts)

At this time, the Socialize service only supports Twitter. You may have one or several Twitter accounts associated with your Google account (which is shared by FeedBurner and other Google products), but each feed may only post to one Twitter account at a time. If for some reason you need the same feed to post to multiple Twitter accounts, you may create a copy of your feed and have that version post to a separate Twitter account.
Formatting Options

You may format your feed for Twitter with a number of options. In all cases, the formatting must fit within the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter. If the options you choose create messages longer than 140 characters, FeedBurner will automatically truncate your messages into 140 character tweets.

Post Content Options for Your Tweets

You may post the feed title, title and body, or just the body as the tweet. If you choose to include a link to the feed item, your feed item permalinks will be rewritten as a shortened URL by Google on the goo.gl domain. These links redirect to your normal FeedBurner URLs so that analytics tracking will not be affected. If you select "Leave room for retweets" we will truncate the message to leave room for rewteeting using the many Twitter clients that support this function.

Hash Tags for Your Tweets

Hash tags are the way that Twitter supports tagging or labeling tweets so that they can easily be grouped by Twitter clients that allow sorting and filtering by these tags. By default, the Socialize service does not add any hash tags to your tweets, however if you select "Create hash tags from item categories" we will automatically create hash tags in the tweet according to any <category> elements attached to the feed item. These categories may be added by your blogging platform or CMS publishing system. In Blogger, these are called "Labels" so if you label your posts in Blogger, these labels will get added as hash tags in Twitter.

Additional Text for Your Tweets

You may choose to add a custom message preceding or following the message that is created from your feed item to add more context. As an example you may choose to prepend "From my blog:" to the beginning of the tweet so that Twitter followers can see which messages you are tweeting directly versus posting links from your long form blog.

Item Selection / Item Limits for Updates

As your feed updates throughout the day, FeedBurner picks up your feed and looks for new items. The Socialize service will detect these new items and post up to 5 of them to twitter at a time. Note that the speed with which feed updates can get to FeedBurner will affect this service. To ensure your feed updates in near real time, make sure you ping us immediately after your feed updates and that your blog platform is configured to use PubSubHubub. If none of these options are used for making your feed near real time, the Socialize service will look for and update with any new feed items every 30 minutes.

Keyword Filters for Your Tweets

You may choose to only send certain feed items to Twitter, filtered either by the Category, or text in the title, body, or the entire item. To enable this filter enter text, with terms separated by commas, and then choose where you would like Socialize to look for these keywords. If this service is enabled, an item will only be tweeted if one of the filtered terms is found.

Preview Your Tweets

Preview lets you see how your tweets will look in your feed as you change Socialize options. If your feed content is not available, the preview uses its own sample text. Note that Preview uses the existing items in the feed, but only new feed items published after the service is activated will actually get posted to Twitter.