One of my favorite automated RSS to social media tool TwitterFeed is going to shut its door on October 31, 2016. In fact - I don't feel surprised at all. A bit sorrow, yes!
TwitterFeed has been behind the scenes of this blog for more than 2 years (although, for many other projects I have been using it since 2010 at least), see: Auto blog to Twitter using Twitterfeed
Here is the official statement from the founder of TwitterFeed, Mario:
Howdy, Twitterfeeders!
We're writing to let you know that Twitterfeed will be shutting its doors on October 31st, 2016. It's been one heck of a run and we can't thank you enough for your loyal usage and support over the years.
If you're looking for a service similar to Twitterfeed to continue using in our absence, we recommend checking out the good folks at Buffer (https://buffer.com) or Dlvr.it (https://dlvr.it)
Thanks again for all the feeds!
Thus TwitterFeed was intended to feed your Twitter account from RSS, what I really loved was its Facebook integration. Speaking of me, Facebook have played a much greater role in attracting traffic than Twitter. Knowing, that every single piece of my content got shared on my Facebook page made me sleeping much better. Thus, lately, I have noticed some bugs from TwitterFeed, OpenGraph and my Facebook page, in short for the past 30 days I have stopped using TwitterFeed at all, instead sharing to Facebook content manually. The fun thing is - I don't mind at all - I have noticed even greater increase in likes and shares, as when in manual mode I spend some time crafting titles and descriptions on Facebook.
Why I don't feel much concerned? Social media generates about 5% of total traffic to my site, yes I would love to see this number higher, but still five percents are five percents. And in most cases, users, and not me re-publish my posts on their walls or Twitter accounts. I don't mind to re-publish my articles on Facebook by hand for some time. Speaking of Buffer or DLVR, they seems nice, but they are paid, and again for those five percents I'm not yet ready to pay yet. Instead I preffer to spend some money on Facebook ADS to boost my manually crafted posts.
That said - it's sad to see TwitterFeed leaving RSS to social media market, we shared zillions of feeds together, attracted thousands of thousands of likes and shares. It was a pleasure ride!
P.S. Drupal friends, there is a module called Facebook auto post which does what it says. See a great tutorial from Internet Devels: Facebook auto posting at the click of a button! I will provide a simple tutorial on Drupal to Facebook soon.
