When I began writing my new book, I knew I wanted to build an audience early, even a couple of years before the book came out. So I launched into social media hot and heavy. Knowing that it would be a pain to keep track of relevant Twitterers as well as maintain my own feed, I opted to organize my Twitter efforts on HootSuite. I considered TweetDeck, but I found HootSuite to be more visually appealing and flexible.
HootSuite and TweetDeck have one major problem, however. You can’t use them to follow RSS feeds. Sure, you can feed RSS feeds into your Twitter profile, but HootSuite limits you to two feeds, and I didn’t want to bombard my followers with feeds they weren’t interested in. I just wanted a way to follow my various feeds on HootSuite. After much web searching, I realized there was no easy way to do this. The closest I came was this site, which was quite helpful, but the strategy outlined there doesn’t allow you to follow multiple RSS feeds in multiple columns on HootSuite. It just allows you to dump all of your RSS feeds into a single column.
So, using that site as a guide, I’ve created instructions on how to follow as many RSS feeds as you want in as many columns as you want on HootSuite. This strategy also works for TweetDeck. There are a lot of steps here, and a lot of accounts to set up, but it works beautifully. If you’ve come up with a simpler way to do things, please let me know in the comments section!
