Making RSS Graffiti

Post Appearance Style Guide

This guide will explain the four main publishing styles available in RSS Graffiti. It is important to select the publishing style that works best for your content. Remember, better looking posts means higher engagement, and more clicks!

The most basic publishing style is the Status Update:

When this style option is selected, RSS Graffiti will publish the title of each feed item as a text-only post. You can also include the URL for that feed item by clicking the “Append link” check box in the style options. This post style is best for brief, text-only messages to your friends or fans.

Another publishing option is the Compact style:

Similar to a status update, this option will create posts using the title of the feed item as text. Below the feed item title, there is a “Read Full Story” link back to the feed item URL, and a customizable “Source” link. By default, the Source link is the homepage of the feed being published, but this can be customized in the source settings. Compact style posts are great for including links in short message published to fans, but like status updates, these posts will not include any description text or media thumbnails.

The next appearance option is the Standard style:

The default and most popular, this style includes the title of the feed item as a link back to the original post, the description text from the feed item, and any media attached to the feed item, including properly embedded images, video, and flash. You can move the description text below the title link with the “move to text box” option, or limit the description text length to a fixed number of characters with the “shorten to” setting.

If incorrect images are appearing with your standard style posts, the most common cause is that your RSS doesn’t include images in the feed. If there isn’t an image attached to the feed item, Facebook will automatically scrape the page being linked to for an image to use. But what if, instead of using the data from the RSS feed, you want Facebook to scrape everything from your page in order to generate the title, description text, and thumbnail?

If you want Facebook to generate all the post details for you, instead of relying on the RSS feed, select the Facebook Default Formatting style setting. With this option selected, RSS Graffiti will send the feed item’s link to Facebook, and Facebook will automatically scrape your page for the title, description text, and thumbnail. All other content in the feed is ignored when this setting is selected. This post appearance is what you see when a link to your content is pasted in a manual Facebook post. You can always control what appears in Facebook’s automatically generated preview using OpenGraph tags in the HTML of the page being linked to.

That’s all for this basic overview of the four main RSS Graffiti style options. These settings are available in the target options window, which can be accessed by clicking on the name of your Facebook page or profile in the publishing plan dashboard. Have questions or need help? Please don’t hesitate to open a thread in our community support forum. Happy posting!

New Feature Launch: AutoShare!

Want your fans to automatically share your content? RSS Graffiti AutoShare empowers your readers to automatically share posts to your feed with their own friends and fan!

Here’s how it works: When a reader clicks an AutoShare link, they are directed to install RSS Graffiti with your feed pre-loaded as the source of a new publishing plan. Once they select a target, such their Facebook profile, and enable the plan, new items in your RSS feed will automatically publish to their timeline.  This allows your readers to spread the word for all their fans and followers to see.

To generate an AutoShare link for your feed, visit app.rssgraffiti.com/autoshare and select your source from the drop down menu. If you’re not currently using RSS Graffiti, you may want to first test the feed with your own publishing plan. Next, select badge, icon, or link, and customize the text. When you’re happy with the preview, paste the embed code onto your web site.

When your readers click this AutoShare link, they are installing RSS Graffiti preloaded with your feed. Make sure your readers understand that when a new item is posted to your feed, it will automatically publish to the Facebook profile or page they select as a target. If they would like to stop posting your content at any time, all they need to do is visit app.rssgraffiti.com and turn off or delete the publishing plan.

We think you’ll find AutoShare a powerful tool to amplify the reach of your content. For more info about this new feature, check out our quick video walkthrough, or visit app.rssgraffiti.com/autoshare to get started right away!

Post Limit Updates and the Premium Optimize Package

Last week we announced we’ll be offering two new Premium Features and new posting limits. We received a lot of feedback, including ideas on how we can continue to improve RSS Graffiti and support our ongoing efforts. We’re happy to have such a thoughtful and supportive community of customers and we’re making changes based on your input. Thanks!

Understanding that the needs of a breaking news organization differ from those of an individual blogger, we wanted to introduce a post frequency option that works for everyone. That’s why in May we’ll be launching a post package called Broadcast. With Broadcast, all customers will receive up to 300 posts per month to each Facebook target page for FREE. For our higher volume publishers, we’ll be offering up to 2000 posts per Facebook target page for a flat monthly fee of $5. For ANY user that wants to post more than 2000 posts to a single page in a month, please give us a shout and we will make exceptions to this limit on a case-by-case basis. Just like before, there will be a 30-day grace period so the limits won’t kick in immediately (posting will continue to be unlimited until June).

Our goal is to offer as much flexibility as possible while enhancing overall Facebook engagement for all of our users. That said, we’re also be offering a new premium feature called Optimize.  The Optimize package is designed with strategic content marketers and publishers in mind, and will help customers learn what content is most effective as well as when it’s most likely to be consumed. Optimize provides analytics for ALL your Facebook content, not just content posted via RSS Graffiti.  Moreover, the Optimize package includes an advanced scheduling tool which allows you to plan precisely when to distribute content. Optimize provides an easy way for all publishers to actively improve the performance of their content. We’re going to offer Optimize for $50 per month, and will come with analytics and advanced scheduling for ALL of your publishing plans.

In our next post, we’ll provide more details on Optimize as well as our other premium feature designed for Breaking and Urgent News publishers.

Please keep sending us comments and ideas and follow our blog, Twitter and Facebook posts throughout April as we reveal more details, including the premium feature benefits and pricing options. If you have questions about the coming changes, please visit our Community Support Forum. Someone from our team is standing by, happy to address any concerns you might have.

The RSS Graffiti Team

Blog: http://blog.rssgraffiti.com
Twitter: @rssgraffiti
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RSS.Graffiti

Coming Soon: RSS Graffiti Premium Features

Thanks for using RSS Graffiti. Customers like you have helped RSS Graffiti grow into the most powerful, flexible, and fully featured application in its class, generating more than a quarter billion impressions each day across hundreds of thousands of Facebook targets.

We want to continue improving RSS Graffiti with features that help our users build an engaged Facebook audience.  To support our ongoing efforts, we’ll be offering two new premium paid features. The new features are specifically designed to help you boost engagement with your audience, delivering content to Facebook with more speed, flexibility, and insight than ever before.

In addition, we will limit the number of FREE posts per Facebook target to 250 per month.  Post bundles after 250 will now be sold in tiers starting at $5 per Facebook target, per month (i.e. up to 500, up to 1500, etc.).  After we officially launch these features in May, we’ll include a 30-day grace period for all current users who post more than 250 times per target page, per month.

The majority of RSS Graffiti users will see NO CHANGE other than additional FREE features and the option to try the premium upgrades. For our high volume users, after the 30-day grace period ends in June, posting will stop after you hit the free 250 monthly post limit per Facebook target, unless you choose to purchase additional post bundles.

It’s important for us to repeat that the vast majority of our users will see NO CHANGE and will be able to continue using RSS Graffiti for FREE. Only those of you who post more than 250 times per month to a single Facebook page, profile or group will be affected by the changes.

Please follow our blog, Twitter and Facebook posts throughout April as we reveal more details, including the premium feature benefits and pricing options. If you have questions about the coming changes, please visit our Community Support Forum. Someone from our team is standing by, happy to address any concerns you might have.

Once again, thank you for using RSS Graffiti. We’re confident that our new premium features will prove valuable, adding robust new capabilities to an application that so many of you have grown to depend on. Thanks for your support!

The RSS Graffiti Team

Blog: http://blog.rssgraffiti.com
Twitter: @RSSGraffiti
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RSS.Graffiti

Posting Instagram hashtag feeds via RSS Graffiti

Instagram users!! Did you know there’s a public RSS feed for every hashtag on the popular photo sharing service? Using these feeds as a source, RSS Graffiti can automatically publish photos to your page, profile, or group whenever they’re uploaded to Instagram with a particular hashtag. Here’s how to get set up:

First, open up the publishing plan dashboard and create a new publishing plan. Select your profile or a page to use as the target. If you run into trouble, see our getting started guide.

Next, get the hashtag feed you want to publish. Use this format: http://instagram.com/tags/HASHTAG/feed/recent.rss replacing “HASHTAG” with your desired hashtag. For example, the feed for the hashtag #palmtrees would be: http://instagram.com/tags/palmtrees/feed/recent.rss

After adding this as your source URL, set your scheduling options, click save, and switch ON the publishing plan. The next time a photo is uploaded to Instagram with your chosen hashtag, RSS Graffiti will automatically publish it to Facebook. It really is that easy.

Now just imagine what you can do with these hashtag feeds: marketers can take advantage of crowdsourced content to engage their online audience, or a group of friends can automatically post moments from their spring break roadtrip. The possibilities are endless.

As always, if you need help posting from Instagram, or have questions about RSS Graffiti in general, please open a thread in our community support forum.

Posting Pinterest to Facebook via RSS Graffiti

Pinterest users!! Did you know RSS Graffiti provides an easy way to automatically publish your pins to Facebook? If you’ve already installed RSS Graffiti, setup is super easy. Just follow the steps below to begin posting your pins right away:

First, open up the publishing plan dashboard and create a new publishing plan. Select your profile or the page you want to use as the target. If you run into trouble, see our getting started guide.

The next step is getting the RSS feed for your Pinterest account. To get a feed of all your pinboards, use this URL for the source: http://pinterest.com/username/feed.rss replacing “username” with your actual username. To only publish pins from one board, use this URL: http://pinterest.com/username/board.rss replacing “board” with the name of the pinboard you’d like to publish. After adding the source URL, select your preferred scheduling options and click save.

That’s all it takes. Switch on the publishing plan, and next time you pin something, RSS Graffiti will automatically push it to Facebook with a beautiful image thumbnail and a link back to your Pinterest page. So easy.

If you need help posting from Pinterest, or using RSS Graffiti in general, please open a thread in our community support forum. Someone from the team will be happy to assist :)