How Using RSS Feeds Can Help You on Social Media

Posted: 11 years ago

In order to regularly participate in social media outlets, you need to have something to say. Not just something to say, but something that would be useful to your customers. Who has the time to spend hours combing the web for interesting things to share or talk about? This is where an RSS reader really comes in handy.

RSS is commonly referred to as Really Simple Syndication. Kind of how your local newspaper has articles written by Associated Press, an RSS feed pushes content from blogs and other content websites to a central place for you to read. I actually use two different RSS readers. I am using Google Reader for my home management blog feeds until I find a replacement and I use Bloglines for work related sources. bloglines-screenshot

I find that when I search for a particular subject -- in our case, legal technology sites, small business tips or information on cloud technology, most of the best articles come from the same handful of websites. If you search somewhere in the upper right hand side of a blog or news site, you will usually find a orange icon like the one at the top of this post or text that says "Subscribe to BLOG NAME HERE."

Once you start adding posts to your RSS reader, you can divide them up into folders if you'd like. This is true whether you use Bloglines or another feed reader. Each week, I scan Bloglines for good articles on our business specialties and use Hootsuite to share them. Once you have a good set of sites to look at for industry news, you may never have to do a random search for information again.

How do you use an RSS Reader?

Jen Steed writes about technology, travel and more. You can find her writing for various online and print publications. To talk to Jen or see all of her articles as they are published, you can follow Jen on Google+.