We Are Organized Chaos

How To Aggregate Several Tweeters (and blog posts) To Tweet From One Twitter Account

Recently I decided to search about a way to set up our company Twitter account so that it will automatically feed tweets from various people within our company. I searched around the web, but didn’t come up with much. I found one site that got me off to a good start, but I developed the process and detailed it out more from there. If you find yourself with a similar need (or want), follow the instructions below. And if you have any questions, please feel free to comment below or send me a tweet @runnerchiq!

Step 1:
Create the main Twitter account you will want as the feed central. (For example, our main Twitter account @zugara is feeding from the company blog, and people from within the company such as: @KobraKai, @Jack2point0, @Bigboots, and @runnerchiq.)

Step 2:
Set up an account at Twitterfeed.

Step 3:
Login to your new Twitterfeed account and click on “Create New Feed”. (If you don’t see this option, click on the “my feeds” link in the upper right corner.)

Step 4:
Click on the large “>>Authenticate at twitter” link up top. This can be a tricky step so please read: If you are currently logged into a particular Twitter account, Twitterfeed will detect this and think that you want to connect to that account. Be sure to read the message that pops up and make sure it says the name of the MAIN Twitter account you are wanting to feed all the tweets through. So in my case, I wanted this to say “zugara”. If the incorrect account name is displayed, click on the “Sign out” link, and type in the correct username and password for the MAIN account you are trying to set the feeds up for. When this is finished, click the button “Allow”.

Step 5:
If you typed in the correct credentials, you will be taken back to the main “Create a new Twitter feed” screen (with the yellow box). Here is where you can set up your feeds. There could be two scenarios:

1. Feed your blog posts

• Paste the RSS feed from your blog into the blank space after “RSS Feed URL”

2. Feed the tweets from everyone in the company (will need to repeat the same steps per person)

• Get the RSS feed from the tweeter by going to http://search.twitter.com
• Type in “from:runnerchiq” – with the “runnerchiq” portion swapped out and replaced with the tweeter YOU want
• You now should see a screen complete with all tweets from your specified tweeter
• Now click on the link titled “Feed for this query” to the right side of the main results screen
• Copy and paste this link into the blank space after “RSS Feed URL”.

Step 6:
Now you are ready to fill in the rest of the remaining sections on the “Create a new Twitter feed” page. This you will have to play around with to create something to your liking. Here are suggestions and what I have done.

1. I want everything to be updated as soon as possible, so I have the “Update frequency” set to “Every 30 minutes” and Post up to “5” new updates each time.
2. I have included only the “title” because of 2 reasons – 1) The blog descriptions are too long, and the title is sufficient, and 2) This tends to duplicate really short tweets…see here for an example of what I’m talking about
3. I include the item link and have it shortened
4. I post new items based on “pubDate”
5. And I prefix the tweets (with the exception of the feed pulling from our blog) with “RT @runnerchiq” with “@runnerchiq” swapped out with whatever tweeter the feed is for. This way, users won’t just see a bunch of random tweets that don’t necessarily make sense from one main Twitter account. This also gives personality and thought credit to the person speaking and encourages followers for that particular account
6. I don’t have any filters by keywords, because I don’t require them, but perhaps you might
7. And be sure to check “Active”!
8. Click on the “Create” button
9. (Repeat for each account you want feed through)

And that pretty much sums up the entire process! One last thing to note is that Twitter takes a few hours to actually approve each feed, and you can check the status my logging into Twitterfeed, clicking “my feeds”, and looking at/scrolling over the symbol to the left of the Username. For example, if a feed has been approved, the symbol will change into a green checkmark and when scrolled over, it will read “status ok…” The feed I created for our company blog was not approved at first, so what I did was delete the feed entirely and tried again…at which point it got approved! I’m not sure what Twitter’s process for approving feeds is, but it doesn’t seem totally streamlined.

Whew, that’s it…good luck!