How to get your Life back. . . Yes, Really!

I'm lazy. I admit it.

I really hate doing stuff repeatedly. When I see a flawed process, I look for an easier way. Often, I find one.

I'm constructively lazy.

Keeping up with everything you need to do on Social Media is a pain in the patootie. We all get that. It isn't that it's very difficult to do. It's more that we have to keep repeating ourselves.

It's a flawed process.

Did I mention I'm lazy?

In my last post, "How To Make Social Media Simple. No, I'm Not Crazy," I touched on this problem. Now, I can announce that The Lazy Man's (or Women's) Era of Social Media has begun.

If you have a blog, you probably have either an RSS or an ATOM feed. If you have a WordPress site or blog, you definitely have an RSS feed.

The act of writing a post causes that post to be added to your feed.

"Big whup," you say?

This is indeed a Big Whup

Both RSS (a.k.a. Really Simple Syndication) and ATOM are flavors of XML. 

XML was designed to pass data around. 

The single act of writing a post makes that post's data available to the World. 

myTweetPack.com is part of the World. 

Are you starting to see it?

Just tell myTweetPack about your feed, and it'll take it from there. Other tweetWolves may even decide to support it with their own retweets.

How to Add a Feed

From your Profile, click Add / Edit Feeds. You'll go here.

Viewing and Editing feeds is straightforward once you know how to add a feed. Click on Add a Feed to go here.

Your first decision is whether to auto-tweet new posts or not. The system schedules tweets for the 3 most recent posts it finds. It also checks for new posts every hour. 

They can add up in a hurry.

Keep the box checked to auto-tweet. Uncheck the box to just store the tweets.

Feed Name: The feed name does double duty. Other tweetWolves may want to support your blog. Give them an easy way to find it. It's also the Campaign name where the tweets are stored.

Posting Frequency: Choose from the drop-down list. It will help other members decide whether they should support everything, or store and choose individually. Don't fib. Some people will want busy feeds, others won't. Fibbing will just piss both groups off.

Feed Link: This is where myTweetPack will go get your stuff. Double-check it. Paste the link into a browser window. Make sure it works. Refer to How To Make Social Media Simple. No, I'm Not Crazy for help on finding it. You can also reach out for help on Live Chat.

Feed Owner: If it's your feed, leave this box blank. If not, type in the feed owner's Twitter handle. The system needs to know whether it should build the tweets as retweets or tweets.

Super-Pack (our name for a topic-group): Pick from the drop down, or keep the original one.

Feed Description: You can get creative here. Talk it up. The more tweetWolves support the feed the more exposure it will get.

Promo Feeds: That's the big box marked "Important." For now, it just sets the feed aside. Soon, we will have a completely different back-end to handle tweets with media (images, video, audio, etc). That would make more sense for feeds that are more about driving people to e-commerce pages.

Click Add Feed and you're done. 

Note to Pack Members: If you want to support someone who is not a member, just add their feed. A caveat, you will support every new post they put out. If that's not what you want to do, uncheck Auto-Tweet New Posts. 

What myTweetPack does for you

• It checks for new posts every hour on the 17th minute. 
• It pulls in anything new up to a maximum of 50 posts. It does not duplicate posts.
• New posts are stored in your name under a Campaign. That Campaign is the feed's name. 
• If auto-tweet is set, it will schedule supporting tweets for the most recent 3 posts. It schedules 8 the first 18 hours, 6 the following day, and 4 a day for the next 5 days. 
• Because the tweets are stored, they will be available for reuse later, or to automatically add to a slow tweeting day. (Lately, I've been so busy, that I've taken to using the "Add Tweets from History" function a lot!)
• It adds hashtags on the end of each tweet. It rotates through #in, #fb, #fbp, #pin, and #tum. Use IFTTT to cross-post to LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Pinterest, and Tumblr respectively.

What myTweetPack doesn't do for you

• We can't write your blog post to beBee, Linkedin, or Medium. You'll still need to copy/paste your post there.
• We can't make multiple links. All supporting tweets point to your blog. If you want some tweets pointing to beBee, LinkedIn, or Medium, use the Clone a Tweet function and swap out the link. 
• In some cases, particularly for ATOM feeds, tweets post as text only. If Twitter can't find an image it doesn't use one. We are working on a possible fix. We want to add a 600X600px masthead image to each post. I'll keep you posted.
• Many feeds are redirected to things like FeedBurner. That doesn't seem to bother myTweetPack, but it may bother you. If you see a significant uptick in FeedBurner-type website referrals, it isn't them, it's myTweetPack.

What if you don't have a Feed?

Not everyone uses WordPress or has a WordPress site. myTweetPack doesn't. We still have a feed, though. 

We can help two ways. 

If you have a non-WordPress website, you probably have access to someone who knows PHP and MySQL. Just ask, and I'll email you the PHP script to build an RSS 2.0 feed.

If you only post on beBee, LinkedIn, or Medium all is not lost. We will soon add a function to build feeds for you. UPDATE: Automated pick-up of new posts is active for LinkedIn, and will soon be for beBee. 

Welcome to the Lazy Person's Era of Social Media Success.

So, what are you going to do with all that new-found spare time? 

I'm going for a long lunch.