How to Howl with the Best: A Lazy Wolf is a Good Wolf

Laziness has a bad rap. People think it's a bad thing. It isn't. Laziness is the driving force behind every human advancement. 

Why walk if you can ride a horse? Why ride a horse if you can sit comfortably in a wagon behind a horse? Ok, that's not the best view. 

Why have the smelly horse at all? Add a motor! 

Wait. Why should we drive? Can't the car just drive itself?

Yes, laziness is behind every meaningful advancement our species ever made.

myTweetPack.com is no exception.

By the way, this is the second in a series on how to use myTweetPack efficiently, easily and quickly. The first installment is here, in case you missed it. It dealt with best-practices to set yourself up. 

This post will describe how to:

• Load a substantial inventory of tweets. 
• Schedule them out to promote whatever it is you want to promote.  
• Keep that tweet inventory updated every time you have something new.

That was quite a mouthful. Must be tough to do, right?

To do all that you will have to  ................................................... (wait for it) ........... ......................................... ............................... do nothing.

That's right, you'll need to do nothing at all. Nothing more than you already do to create your stuff in the first place, anyway. 

Actually, in some cases, you won't even need to do that.

How's that for laziness winning the day?

Write a post, upload a YouTube video, write an article, or add a product to your eCommerce site, just like you always do. 

Nothing more. 

We will find it. We will store it as a tweet. We will schedule tweets to promote it.

Easy Peasy

myTweetPack.com uses RSS and ATOM feeds to automatically pull in new stuff and automatically schedule tweets from that stuff (or not, your choice). 

Feeds come in three flavors.

• There are feeds you can add yourself
• There are feeds we add for you
• There are feeds we create for you.

Feeds You can add Yourself

These are feeds to personal and/or corporate blogs and/or product listings. You control these directly and adding them is straight-forward. 

It's a self-serve thing.

The trouble is, you may not know you already have them. 

Example: If you have a WordPress site or blog, you already have an RSS feed. Navigate to your blog. Add /feed/ to the end of the address in the window. A bunch of gobbledygook will fill your screen.

That's your feed. That's your feed's link.

With that link in hand, you just pop over to your myTweetPack Profile Page. There, you hit "Add or Edit Feeds" --> "Add a Feed" and fill out the short form. 

Save and you're done. 

We'll check the feed every hour. We'll pull in anything new as a tweet and store it. If you set it to auto-tweet, we'll schedule the tweets out too.

And you did..... nothing.

Feeds we add for you

Other feeds are more complicated to put together. Self-serve is out of the question.

Did you know you have a numerical ID on LinkedIn? You do. Everyone does. 

It isn't easy to find. Most people don't even know it exists. Once you have it, linking LinkedIn articles is a breeze.

I could tell you how to find it, but your eyes would just roll back into your head. Let's just say it's buried in 5700+ lines of code and fuggedaboutit. 

You don't need to worry about it. We already did all the heavy lifting.

Examples of this type of feed are LinkedIn and Medium articles. For the contributor authors only, feeds to Forbes, The Good Men Project, Entrepreneur, and Huffington Post also fall here

From your Profile Page, hit "Create RSS to LinkedIn, beBee, Medium, YouTube, or Big Media." Complete the short form and send. Just remember to set whether you want us to autotweet for you. 

I write on beBee and copy/paste to LinkedIn. I don't need to autotweet from both.

We'll email you when the feed(s) is/are ready. 

Feeds we create for you

This type is really a sub-type of "Feeds we add for you." You get them the same way. You just need to click on  "Create RSS to LinkedIn, beBee, Medium, YouTube, or Big Media."

For most feeds, we just need to figure out the link structure to find them. That's fine if they exist. 

What if they don't? Two of the feeds people asked for don't. 

If a feed doesn't exist, we create it. That means we mine a page's HTML for the data we need. Then, we rebuild the data as an RSS feed. 

Sound complicated? That's 'cause it is. It's complicated for us. 

For you, it's a cinch.

Luckily, only two feeds fall into this type, beBee Producer posts and Inc contributor articles.

That's why we can only pull out the most recent eight beBee Producer posts. Your beBee Producer profile page only lists those last eight. 

True, if you scroll down you can see them all. They aren't really there. They just look like they are. As you scroll down, an  AJAX call pulls in more posts. 

AJAX is shorthand for (A)synchronous (J)avascript (A)nd (X)ML. It's a cool technique for pulling in data without reloading the whole page. 

Servers can't scroll. Servers can't make AJAX calls on another server.

So, last eight beBee posts it is.

The Fourth, Unlisted Type of Feed

This is a feed that isn't yours. They belong to some other tweetWolf in the same Pack. It can be any of the other types.

All tweetWolves see feeds owned by other Pack Members. If they choose, they can support them with retweets. They do that by just checking a box and hitting Add.

Complicated, huh?

Why You should care about all this stuff

You may not see yourself as being lazy. I consider myself constructively lazy. 

Or, is that just being efficient?

PotAYto, PotAHto, same thing.

Combine Twitter's promotional power with myTweetPack's scheduling system and you have a super-powerful, cheaper than dirt, promotion system. 

Add RSS/ATOM feeds into the mix and you have the ability to pull in data without doing anything at all. At least, you don't do anything more than create the stuff in the first place.

You already do that.

New wolves can pull in their last 50 LinkedIn posts, their last 50 Medium articles, their last 50 YouTube videos, and their last 8 beBee articles. Without doing anything! 

That's Instant Inventory!

You can even use your myTweetPack feeds with other systems like Buffer to automatically cross-post to other platforms. I prefer the IFTTT method, but hey, it's your feed.

Why not do more with the same work? 

It's the Human Way.

It served us well for generations. For better or worse, it made a weak, slow, sensory-deprived animal the dominant life form on this big blue rock.

A final word or two about Our Feeds

We only pull in and store the most recent 50 items. The exception is beBee Producer posts where we are limited to the last eight. 

That has nothing to do with the feed, itself. It's a limitation I built into the system. It's a collection limit not a feed limit. 

Fifty is more than ample for our purposes.

Susan Rooks has 400+ LinkedIn posts. She doesn't need them all cluttering up her Dashboard. All 400+ posts are in her LinkedIn feed, though. 

If you use your feed elsewhere, remember that you have access to all items in that feed. Be careful!

Next, we'll go over easy sharing.

Cheers