Update: Notes has been troublesome of late, often stalling and needing to be reset to start pulling in blog posts again. While I prefer to use native options where available, if they don’t work they’re not much use.
When discussing this on Twitter I got a tip from Leon in ReverbStudios to look at dlvr.it instead.
Have a look at this Techcrunch article about dlvr.it. For now, I recommend ignoring the below post and just going straight to dlvr.it. It’s been working really well for me over the last couple of weeks.
Did you know you can automatically share blog posts on FaceBook by using the FaceBook Notes application? It’s a really great way to get your content into FaceBook without having to remember to share every post manually. They will be shared in your feed and visible to your friends, to the best of my knowledge the only possible downside is that you have somewhat less control over the time you share on FaceBook.
Unfortunately for those of us who post to multiple blogs Notes only allows you to import from one RSS feed.
Luckily there are tools available to take many RSS feeds and convert them into a single RSS feed. The one I use currently is Yahoo Pipes, the reason being that I have found it to be the most dependable, and since it’s Yahoo is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
WordPress users: if you contribute to a group blog, don’t forget that WordPress generates a feed for each contributor – usually found at: http://example.com/author/myname/feed so you can just pull in your own posts to FaceBook.
1: Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo Pipes can be a little daunting at first, but for what we want to do it’s really quite a simple set up. Once you’ve set up an account:
- click on the “Create a Pipe” button
- On the left hand menu “sources” is usually expanded by default – drag “Fetch Feed” from the left onto the main area
- In the URL entry box paste your RSS feed
- Click on the + to add another RSS feed
- Once you have added all your feed URL’s click on the “Operators” menu on the left and drag “Sort” onto the main area
- Click on the arrow next to the input field and select “item.pubDate” and set the second drop down set to “descending”
- Click the little circular icon under Fetch Feed and drag to the little circular icon over Sort
- Do the same to connect Sort to Pipe Output
- Click on Pipe Output to see a preview
- Click on the Save button (top right)
- You should see “Pipe Saved. Run Pipe” at the top of the page. Click on “Run Pipe” to test
To see how my Yahoo Pipe looks click here, or watch a YouTube video of someone making a similar Pipe so you can understand it better.
You can give your Pipe a friendly URL by first going to my pipes and clicking the ‘edit’ link next to your Pipes web address. I put my name here so my Pipes web address is http://pipes.yahoo.com/frankprendergast
Next click on ‘view results’ of your pipe and edit the Pipe Web Address so that you end up with something like http://pipes.yahoo.com/frankprendergast/facebookrss
2. Troubleshooting & Feedburner
Hopefully the above will have gone smoothly for you. But if it didn’t Yahoo Pipes may be having trouble parsing your feeds. I ran into this problem even though the feeds, so far as I could see, seemed to be fine.
I noticed that any of my feeds feeds that were already being run through Google Feedburner did not seem problematic, so I created a Feedburner feed for any problematic feed.
In order to ensure the Feedburner feeds worked in Pipes I enabled ‘SmartFeed’ under the Optimize area.
- Because Feedburner is owned by Google you can sign in using your Google or Gmail account if you already have one
- Once your logged in you will see the input box to “Burn a feed right this instant” – put your feed URL in here and click next
- The following page allows you to edit your feed title and URL (make a note of the URL), usually you can just leave them as they are and click next
- Now your feed is created, read through the following options and select the ones your want (no harm in ticking all the boxes if in doubt: track clickthroughs, item enclosures and more) and click next again
- Click on the Optimize tab on the following page and click on Smartfeed
- Activate Smartfeed
- Now you can use the Feedburner URL for the feeds that were problematic in Yahoo Pipes
WordPress users: it’s not a bad idea to use Feedburner on your feeds anyway to get stats on subscribers, Feedburner provide a plugin to install that will redirect a WordPress feed to your Feedburner one.
3. FaceBook Notes
Once you have your Yahoo Pipe set up and working correctly you need to import the new RSS feed generated by Yahoo Pipes into FaceBook. Armed with the Pipe url you created log into FaceBook.
- Go to FaceBook Notes
- Under Notes setting click on “Import a blog” or if you’re already importing one it will be “edit import settings”
- Paste in the Pipe url into the input box, check the box to confirm you have the right to share it and click “start importing”
- You will be shown a preview of the RSS feed, confirm all looks correct and click “confirm import”
Here is an illustrated article of importing a feed into FaceBook notes.
To do the same for a Page (as opposed to your Profile) go to the Edit Page options and you’ll see Notes listed under Applications. Click on Edit Notes and from there it’s the same as above.
Ta da! Your blog posts from multiple blogs will be shared on FaceBook automatically.
Extra tip: If you go your profile once logged into FaceBook and click on the notes tab you can click on any note’s headline and go to that note. Once on a single note you can tag people in the note. This is worth doing if you have mentioned people you are friends with on FaceBook as it broadens the exposure for the note – friends of the person tagged will be notified. I recommend tagging anyone you mention, but do take care not to just tag for the sake of broadening exposure as it is much more likely you will annoy people and generate negativity.