Auto Tweeting Quality Links

People regularly ask me how I manage to post links to Twitter all day long and still have a life. (Or a job.) I’ve let a few people in on the secret sauce, but I wanted something to refer people to when they asked on Twitter.

It all starts with Google Reader. At the beginning of this year, I spent several weeks seeking out news sites and blogs that consistently provided quality material and links. I started by subscribing to Hacker News, because they link to a lot of great articles and blog posts. As I found headlines that caught my eye I would click thru to the site and look around. If the site consistently provided a lot of good material I would add it directly to Reader for a trial run. Sites that didn’t provide great content or if I found myself skipping everything from a particular source I would remove them to reduce the noise.

Folders are a great way of grouping and organizing your content and Reader provides you with just that. I only keep a few folders, but every feed goes into one of them. Notably, I have one folder just for news items. Thanks to Fast Company, The Next Web, The Verge and several others, I get hundreds of posts in this folder every day. (I had The Onion in there for a bit, but it fooled me too many times.) Keeping opinion pieces and development articles in their own folders ensures I can easily get to the kind of content I want to read and that nothing gets buried under those news feeds.

One of the great things about RSS (and Google Reader, in particular) is that there are a lot of quality clients available. On my Android phone (blech, I need to get an iPhone) I use Flipboard to show some of the most recent headlines on my home screen and use Google’s Reader app to actually read thru headlines, because it’s faster. On my mac I use Reeder, because it has a clean and snappy interface with keyboard shortcuts. All of them are great clients and, critically, they all allow me to star items I like.

Reader provides you with the ability to turn your folders and starred items into public pages. Its like your own curated blog, made up of everyone else’s material with Google’s ads, which is basically useless, except for the fact that it comes with an Atom feed. The feed contains the titles and URLs of the starred posts which we can use below.

The last piece of the puzzle is a social manager service called Pluggio. It helps you manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts by providing you with tools for scheduling your tweets and posts. You can either schedule posts for a certain time or put them into the Dripfeed to release them throughout the day. I use this with another tool they call the content stream, which pulls in material from RSS feeds. By grabbing the titles and URLs from the Atom feed and putting them into Pluggio’s Dripfeed, I can provide a solid stream of updates on Twitter throughout the day.

It’s nothing revolutionary, but it does allow me to provide some quality content on Twitter without having to spend all day managing it. Now I just need to find a good way of managing my Twitter feed.