How to Automatically Post to Social Media from Your Blog or Newsletter’s RSS Feed
If you have a blog or newsletter, you probably have an RSS feed, which simply is the blog’s content in a machine-readable format. You probably also have social media accounts, like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn. With a few simple steps, you can automate the entire process so every time you update your blog a post will go to all your social media accounts using your RSS feeds.
What is an RSS Feed
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it is a feed of changes to your website, usually articles, that can be easily read by a computer. For example, if you add a new blog post, the RSS feed will show a new post was added.
Here is a snippet of our RSS feed.
<description><![CDATA[
<p>How we used Firebase to build Ayrshare</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://ayrshare.positorgroup.com/our-firebase-tech-stack/">Our Firebase Tech Stack</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://ayrshare.positorgroup.com">Ayrshare - Automate Your Social Media Posts</a>.
</p>
]]></description>You can see in the example the basic structure of the RSS. The are descriptions, title, and even links. If you want to dive deep, check out the RSS specification.
Most blogs have an RSS feed. If not directly mentioned on the site with an icon, you can try appending /feed or /rss to the site’s url. For example Emily Oster’s Substack newsletter at https://emilyoster.substack.com/ has an RSS feed at https://emilyoster.substack.com/feed.
Why have an RSS feed?
The format is useful for content aggregators. such as Feedly or or Panda, so you can read all you favorite newsletter or blogs posts in one place. In fact, RSS formatted data isn’t just useful for blogs. Any blog content or newsletter content you want consumed by another service, e.g. an app, api, or server, can use an RSS feed.
Furthermore, sending RSS feed to social media allows you to take your website’s content and automate the publication to your social networks.
Social Media Automation
After you write a blog/newsletter post or produce some content, you probably spread the word by posting to your social media account. With an RSS feed you can save time by having all your new content automatically posted to the networks like so:
RSS Feed to Facebook
There are several social media scheduling tools that support automating RSS feeds posting to social media, such as Sendible or SocialChamp. Note: Buffer had a great RSS auto posting feature, but got rid of it in May, 2020.
Let’s look at an example of sending your RSS feed to Facebook using Ayrshare, which is a social media scheduling tool API. While this example uses a standard Substack RSS feed, you can use any RSS feed, such as YouTube’s RSS feed to post all your new videos.
Setup Auto-Posting from the RSS Feed:
- Find and copy your RSS feed url. If you have a blog or newsletter, try adding a /feed or /rss at the end. If you can’t find the RSS URL, try our RSS Finder. For example, a Substack newsletter feed ends in /feed.
- Go to Ayrshare and create a free account. It is free for up to 20 posts a month.
- You’ll need to setup your social accounts, such Facebook Instagram. After signing up you’ll be in the Ayrshare dashboard, click the “Social Accounts”. It only takes a few seconds per network. The available social networks for RSS are: Instagram, Facebook (Pages and Groups), LinkedIn, Twitter, Telegram, and Pinterest.
- Now let’s add your RSS feed. In the Ayrshare dashboard click the “RSS Feed” tab on the left and enter in your RSS URL.
- Finally, Click “Add RSS” and then your feed will appear. In about 10 minutes your first post will appear.
Now every time you create a new newsletters post or add content to your RSS feed you’ll automatically post to all of your connected social networks. You can even add a YouTube RSS feed.
Add Your RSS Feed Using the API
One final method to add and manage your auto-posting from the RSS feed is via the API. The /feeds API endpoint gives you the ability to add or delete feeds, and subscribe to a webhook to be notified of new posts.
Here is example JavaScript code to add the new RSS feed:
const fetch = require("node-fetch");
const API_KEY = "API_KEY";
const url = "https:///www.nytimes.com";
fetch("https://app.ayrshare.com/api/feed", {
method: "DELETE",
headers: {
"Content-Type": "application/json",
"Authorization": `Bearer ${API_KEY}`
},
body: JSON.stringify({ url }),
})
.then((res) => res.json())
.then((json) => console.log(json))
.catch(console.error);While the system will try to find the feed for a website, I recommend adding the full URL of the feed to be sure the correct one is found.
