by Tim Elliott on August 2, 2011
Producing content regularly on Twitter and Facebook is essential to driving growth and engagement. And there are plenty of tools to help automate the process of announcing new posts or sharing interesting links. One of my favorites is Twitterfeed, a free service that easily lets you publish any RSS feed content automatically to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other services.
Setup is easy, just enter your RSS feed in the first step and then choose the service you would like to pipe the feed content into. There are controls in the advanced section to set polling frequency, add a prefix, hashtag, or control the number of entries send each time. If you post to Facebook, Twitterfeed can be used to update personal profiles or Facebook Pages making this an easy way to pipe blog posts into that social network. Another interesting use case is posting your Google Reader shared items via the RSS feed found on your Reader public profile page.
Once setup, you don’t have to worry about posting feed updates manually anymore. If you have a creative use case for Twitterfeed, post them up in the comments.
by Tim Elliott on August 1, 2011
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When signing up for a Facebook Page, you are confronted with a decision that seems fairly obvious: which classification best fits your business? And while it seems to make little difference on the surface, choosing a classification poorly can effect your results on the social network. So let’s review your choices and explore the best selection for wineries.
To start the process of building your Facebook Page just click on the “Create a Page” link in the footer (note: you can now create a Facebook Page without a personal profile if you prefer). You will immediately see six choices shown in the image to the right. The top three are the ones wineries should consider but I recommend the one on the far right titled, “Brand or Product.” This is due to two reasons. First, wineries sell products and build brands. Second, there is a “Wine/Spirits” category in the listing for only that option that will help people find you in search. Yes, wineries are also “places” but Facebook Places pages can easily be combined into any Facebook Page regardless of classification (more on that next week).
I’m sure many wineries might be wondering if they can change their classification but unfortunately this is not possible right now. Since many Facebook Pages were created when only one classification was available (“Company, Organization, or Institution”) I expect this to change. And when it does, I’ll be sure to write about it here. In the meantime, choose Brand or Product.”
