Building Your Sites

An Easy Way to Twitter and Facebook Post

Do you have your own website, a blog, or a site with a band page you’ve set up that includes an RSS feed? If you do, you can have the feed automatically sent to your Twitter account or post on your Facebook page using twitterfeed.com. It is really easy to do.

Do you have an RSS feed?

You might have an RSS feed, even if you don’t know it. For example, if you have a band page on MySpace, you have an RSS feed. Most blogs include one. If you have a Wordpress based site, you have one. You can tell if there’s an RSS feed icon showing on somewhere on your web page, or if the RSS icon shows up in the address bar at the top of your browser.They should look like this  or this: . If you see an RSS icon, click on it. If you then see a page that has activity relating to you, then you have a feed!

Auto post your feed to Twitter, Facebook and others

Keeping a fairly active Twitter stream, or current posts on your band’s Facebook page helps you alive to your fans who follow your Twitter account, or are your fans on Facebook. The website twitterfeed.com makes it very simple to automatically post your RSS feeds.

First, create a list of what all RSS feeds you have. Then, create a twitterfeed account. It is uses your e-mail address, and you can create multiple feeds (both different RSS sources, and different auto-post destinations) using the single e-mail account. The process is fairly simple – twitterfeed does a very nice job of stepping you through the process, so I won’t repeat all that info here.

Once your twitterfeed acount is active, it will check your feeds on an hourly basis, and update your Twitter, Facebook, or other account. You should be sure the feeds you setup give different information – it won’t look good if all your tweets are the same thing. The tweets usually consist of the feed item title and an automatically generated short link to the full article. Facebook includes part of the article text, again with a link back to the original.

What about my Wordpress twitter plugin?

There is an excellent plugin for Wordpress called “WP->Twitter” that has some advantages over twitterfeed. First, the WP plugin sends the tweet immediately – not at a scheduled time (every 30 minutes to 24 hours). That usually won’t matter. But the plugin also gives you several options for specifying just what goes into the tweet that are a little more flexible than the options offered by twitterfeed. It looks a little nicer. But the reality is that the twitterfeed service is just plain easier, and it includes Facebook, Laconica, hellotxt, and ping.fm services as well.

A Gravatar is an avatar you can set up at Gravatar.com. You associate a square avatar with your e-mail address, and then whenever you create a post at a website that supports Gravatars, your own avatar will automatically show up. Wordpress is one of the main sites that support Gravatars, although I’ve seen them crop up elsewhere.

If you have a Wordpress based site, you have the option of turning Gravatars on or off, and they are currently turned off at Indie Ave because I didn’t like the way they showed up in my pages. I might give it another try later.

But at the moment, I think the answer is yes, you should get your own Gravatar so your avatar will show up if you post to a Gravatar enabled site.

The design your use for your avatar is fairly important because it will help to establish your band’s “brand”. Ideally, your avatar will be based on your band’s logo – something you want to become automatically associated with your band. And it would be great if your avatar really stands out when it is displayed, even in a tiny 16×16 or 32×32 picture such as you might find on Twitter. (Twitter does not use Gravatar, but it would be an excellent idea to use the same design for both!) Done right, your avatar can even serve as your favicon.ico for your web site (more on that later in another article, but you can Google favicon.ico to learn more now if you want.)

For example, here are Ivory Drive’s and Indie Ave’s avatars: 

The Ivory Drive avatar really stands out when it is displayed in a group of other avatars. It is being used as Ivory Drive’s Gravatar, its favicon.ico, and many other places. This avatar is not the only square picture Ivory Drive uses, however. It is better to use a real photograph on most of the websites that host band pages. However, whenever appropriate, it is a good idea to use a single gravatar (or close variation) whenever possible to maximize your brand image.

It is fairly easy to define your avatar at Gravatar.com. The idea is to associate an e-mail address with an avatar. Then, whenever you post to a site that supports Gravatars, the site will use your e-mail to fetch the corresponding Gravatar. This means you either need to be consistent on the e-mail address you use when you post, or add all the e-mail addresses you use to post to your Gravatar.com account. Just go to Gravatar.com to set up your account.

Note – this is not the most critical topic I hope to discuss here at Indie Ave, but I just spent some time setting up Indie Ave’s and Ivory Drive’s Gravatars, so now is the time to write about it!