Auto Publish Feed to Twitter in Real-Time with FeedBurner (TwitterFeed Alternative)

Content publishers and bloggers who want to tweet the new blog posts as status update to Twitter normally have to manually post the tweets via Internet and SMS, or rely on plugin or addon which available for the platform website is built on, or use TwitterFeed.

TwitterFeed makes it easy for webmasters to feed and publish blogs, forums, and any site with syndication RSS feed to tweet the latest posts or articles on Twitter, by grabbing title and content from the feed. However, TwitterFeed is slow to tweet, as TwitterFeed depends “pull”, which runs on schedule to read the feed at fixed interval, with limited number of items (up to 5) been posted each time. In addition, when adding new feed to TwitterFeed, the tweet update to Twitter is subjected to at least 30 minutes delay.

For people who looks for faster alternative to TwitterFeed, now FeedBurner is offering the ability to direct the feed in real-time to Twitter endpoint. With “Socialize” feature, FeedBurner can automatically publish the feed items that meet any filtering criteria to Twitter, using the Google URL shortener at goo.gl.

Here’s the guide on how to turn on and enable Socialize in FeedBurner to tweet the feed content to Twitter:

1. Login to FeedBurner.
2. Select the feed which user wants to tweet in realtime.
3. Go to the Publicize tab.
4. Go to the Socialize service.
5. Click on Add a Twitter account button.
6. Login with username or email with password, then click Allow button to authorize and add the Twitter account to which user would like to post items from the feed.
7. Change the formatting options and item selection settings if prefer.
8. Click on Activate or Save button to start the auto-tweet function.

Tip: To ensure that any new feed item is been sent to Twitter in near real-time, just ping the FeedBurner whenever the feed is updated.

For example, visit My Digital Life blog tweet @mdlblog.

There are few disadvantages with FeedBurner’s Socialize though. It doesn’t have the ability to send update to other sites such as Facebook. And only goo.gl URL shortener is supported, and there is no click-through report or any tracking statistics available, although publishers can get possibly get the data from FeedBurner and/or Google Analytics.