Tweet your blog post to multiple twitter accounts

I use a plugin called Twitme to broadcast new roz blog posts to my twitter followers in the interest of getting a few extra readers amongst my peers. That’s been working great while posting to my personal twitter account which is only visible to my close circle but when I started my new @realmofzod twitter account just for this blog I couldn’t tweet out to both accounts at once, I had to pick one. Naturally, @realmofzod gets first dibs on broadcasting new posts since that is it’s purpose but I didn’t want to lose the automated tweets on my personal feed either so I had to get creative. I needed a way to automate retweeting from @realmofzod to my personal feed. After some googling I found a functional method. Here’s how I did it.

First I started in my wordpress dashboard. I grabbed the very helpful twitme plugin from the repository and configured it to tweet to my @realmofzod account whenever I post a new blog entry.

Next I went to yahoo pipes, a wonderful tool provided by yahoo to process aggregated data and construct custom feeds. I used this handy tool to pull my @realmofzod twitter feed’s atom feed. This looks something like:

http://username:password@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.atom

I plugged this into the “Fetch Feed” Source module and piped this to the “Regex” Operator module so I could prepend the @realmofzod at the beginning of the item.title  with RT to indicate “Retweet” like a good twitizen (is that a word yet?).

This generates a new feed for us that converts this:

@realmofzod: New Blog Post “New Twitter Feed” on Realm of Zod: http://bit.ly/Iy9ig

to this:

RT: @realmofzod: New Blog Post “New Twitter Feed” on Realm of Zod: http://bit.ly/Iy9ig

You can see this in action when you run the pipe. Now you need to grab the pipe’s rss output url which is presented a fairly obvious way.

Now we need a tool to take an RSS feed and channel it to another twitter feed as input. I found a great tool for this and more called twitterfeed. This allows you to connect an rss feed to your twitter account and have it tweet out using that account any time a new item comes in from the feed. After signing up for an account on twitterfeed.com, I created a new feed in my account. When you do this, you will associate the feed with a particular twitter account using Oauth so make sure you have already logged in to your destination twitter account first. Next give your feed a name and plugin the RSS url for your pipe. Make sure it works and then tweak your advanced settings to taste.

Once you have created your feed you are done. Depending on the frequency you setup for updating you feed you should see a tweet for your new blog posts go to the primary twitter account and then retweet in the secondary twitter account afterwards.

All I have to do now is blog away and everything else is automated for me. How cool is that?