The secret is to share both your own content and other useful resources as you come across them.

You’ll want to increase your odds of encountering said useful third-party content. Just as you will want to make the process of sharing that content as painless and automated as possible.

It’s still important to have a degree of manual interaction with each platform to create genuine connections with other users. Just be careful to not let it become a time sink.

Discovering content worth sharing

The best way to come across great content to share on social media is to pay attention to what other people in your industry are sharing. Follow relevant people on social media and rebroadcast (retweet/share) their best content. Become a human filter of the greatest, most useful content for your industry.

Participate in online communities relevant to your industry. Programmers will, for example, find luck in communities such as /r/programming, /r/webdev, Hashnode, Dev.to, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, and so on.

Listen to podcasts and subscribe to YouTube channels by influencers within your field.

Finally, take advantage of good ol’ RSS feeds. Subscribe to a variety of blogs and publications to have fresh content to share.

I’m partial to Feedly for reasons that will become clear later in this post, but any feed service or client will do. You’ll want to install an appropriate browser extension. This way you’ll be able to subscribe to sites you find interesting, with just one click. In my case, I use Feedly Subscribe Button for Firefox.

Use Buffer to queue up articles

There are a gajillion social media tools. I like the simplicity of Buffer. It allows you to queue up content you intend to share on a multitude of different platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn).

It also handles the scheduling of content in the queue, so that it’s not shared all at once. This ensures a constant stream of fresh new content for your followers, without long periods of radio silence.

Once you install the Buffer extension for your browser, you’ll be able to quickly add any page you wish to your social media queue. You simply click on the Buffer icon in your toolbar while visiting a post or page you intend to share.

It removes the inertia of having to manually share updates across platforms, making you more likely to do so in the first place.

Other tools are alright as well, but if you don’t have a favorite yet, I highly recommend giving Buffer a try.

Automate Your Social Media with IFTTT

You’re now sharing your own content, retweeting/sharing from the best influencers, and using the Buffer extension to share useful resources directly from your browser.

If you want to take it to the next level, you could automate the process of adding to Buffer articles from your RSS feed client. This is where Feedly and IFTTT come into play.

IFTTT allows you to automate certain actions when a certain trigger is executed. In our case, you’d want to define an applet within IFTTT, that involves both Feedly and Buffer.

You’d set up a Feedly-related trigger that adds a given article to Buffer. In my case, I decided to create a Social board in Feedly. Whenever I add an article to that board, it gets shared on social media via Buffer.

There are two catches. The first is that Feedly requires a paid account for this integration to work. The second one is that Buffer can only connect one social media account within IFTTT. So if you have Twitter, LinkedIn, and a Facebook Page in your Buffer, you’ll have to choose which one will post the articles you add to the predefined board (e.g., Social).

In my case, I chose the Twitter account within Buffer.

The advantage of connecting Feedly to Buffer, instead of connecting it to Twitter directly (bypassing Buffer altogether) is that posts get scheduled. This way you can select, say, 10 articles within Feedly in the span of two minutes, without immediately posting all 10 to your social media account, overwhelming your followers.

Doing all this still takes some time, but automating your social media posts goes a long way. It really shortens the time and effort involved from when you encounter something interesting to you sharing it on social media.

With a bit of discipline and a few minutes each day, you could easily become a must-follow account.

The post Automate Your Social Media Posts appeared first on Technical Blogging.

It all started with Google’s attempt to steer their huge ship towards the mythical land of all things Social. You see, Facebook’s success really took a few giant tech companies by surprise. Google in particular. Surely, they thought to themselves, we must be able to compete.

So instead of focusing on their core competency, they decided to start throwing Social everywhere. It showed up in their search results. It was pushed down your Gmail throat. You had to have a Google+ account to use Google’s services in any capacity. UI and accounts got more and more confusing. YouTubers weren’t spared either.

Oh, and they wanted your real name, like Facebook. If you are secretly transgender or wanted by the Iranian government, tough luck, kiddo. (The relative lack of Social success and massive protests have eventually led them to change their initial policy.)

So what does this circus has to do with the RSS feed? Well, when you’re wearing Social blinders, that’s all you can see. They discontinued most of their services that couldn’t be adopted to this narrow world view.

Google Reader, the first successful attempt at making RSS feeds somewhat mainstream, was shut down. Instead of this handy service that was already loved by millions around the world, they wanted you to share articles on their social network. Follow people, put them in circles, and generally pretend you were on Facebook. There, they figured, no need to properly follow a feed with the purpose of never missing a new article. Good stuff will bubble up to the surface. Hopefully.

To round things off, they also got rid of the RSS button in Chrome so that finding the feed for a site is now a decent first exercise in learning HTML programming for the general public.

These two simple steps by Google have pretty much mortally wounded the RSS feed. It won’t recover I’m afraid and it’s a damn shame. A minority of geeks will continue to use the technology via services like Feedly, but the mainstream dream is gone.

All for a social network that relatively few people use, let alone in any serious capacity (at least in part because Google stubbornly refuses to open their API to allow third-party apps, like Buffer and Hootsuite, to post on people’s own profiles).

If you think I’m just talking hypothetically, think again. I saw one of my blogs go from a healthy 16,000 RSS subscribers to less than 300 in the span of just a month or so after this change was made (many, including my wife, who is a popular blogger in her field, witnessed the same sort of abrupt, brutal nosedive with her RSS numbers as well).

From a blogger’s perspective, this irreversible change has some serious implications:

1. Email subscriptions have never been more important. Unlike Facebook subscribers or Twitter followers who will rarely see your updates, emails are still being read and given a certain importance by the subscriber (Google is trying to mess this up too, but that’s a whole other post). You need to capture people’s email as it’s the only guaranteed delivery method for your updates that you have. (On that note, you can subscribe here.)
2. Feel free to maximize your social media properties and efforts, engage and entertain users, but have an email subscription as your ultimate call to action.
3. For the sake of us geeks who are unwilling to give up the good fight, do be sure to prominently feature an RSS feed link/button on your blog or site.
4. If your audience is not technical, consider having a ‘How to follow this blog’ link with step-by-step instructions on using Feedly or Bloglovin (the latter of which is particularly popular among women).

It’s an unfortunate turn of events that has damaged blogging in an untold number of ways. Thankfully, it hasn’t killed things off entirely though, especially if we are willing to adapt.

The post Google Killed the RSS Feed appeared first on Technical Blogging.