FeedBurner, Twitter & Analytics

Way back in November Google Analytics announced a nice little integration with FeedBurner. Basically, with a couple configuration settings you can connect your FeedBurner RSS with Google Analytics to save time and get a better analysis of your feed.

Today, Google went a step further by announcing two nuggets that caused us to pause…sigh…and then give two thumbs up. First, the Goog.gl URL shortener and second, the Feedburner Socialize setting which when combined allows you to publish a feed to Twitter. Why is this a big deal? Because the Goog.gl + FeedBurner + Twitter combo means near real-time publishing of your RSS feed! At first glance, it may seem like semantics and honestly, we’re not overly concerned with ‘immediate’ publishing or reading a feed….not today anyway but ‘real-time’ is becoming increasingly useful. We won’t go into the details of why that’s the case because for now this combo, when combined with the functionality released in November, provides a fair amount of flexibility and more importantly streamlining.

For example, if you’re hosting a WordPress blog you’re able to remove “post to twitter” plugin’s. Likewise, if you’re using a web-app that sends your RSS to Twitter (TwitterFeed, RSSToTwitter.com etc.) you can remove your blog RSS feed. Here’s how;

• Pop open your FeedBurner account (Sign Up Here if you don’t already have one) and navigate to the Analytics tab. In the bottom-left column you’ll see Services – Configure Stats where you’ll be able to configure your Google Analytics settings.
• Go to the Publicize tab and find the Socialize link in the left navigation pane. Add your Twitter account and fill in the relevant details. You might want to set the Item Limit to 1 initially since your feed will publish almost immediately.
• After publishing a blog post head over to Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns and you’ll be able to evaluate your RSS feed stats with a lot more functionality than you would otherwise have in FeedBurner.

Do you have multiple feeds?

If you’re burning multiple feeds you can make the above FeedBurner Publicize > Socialize setting for each feed. Keep in mind there’s a “many-to-many” relationship, so you can have multiple feeds going to multiple Twitter accounts and vice versa.

Alternative Ideas

UPDATE: We’re still testing the following scenario, so we’ll let you know how it turns out. If you’re using Google Reader to read feeds, you might also want to try publishing your “shared articles”. Grab your Google Reader Shared Items URL ( http://www.google.com/reader/shared/YOUR-USERNAME) and RSS URL, add your Shared Items URL to FeedBurner and finally in FeedBurner go to Publicize > Socialize to send your shared items to your Twitter account.

We’re not advocating that bombarding us with every link and blog post to the world, instead this is meant to help save you a little time bouncing from tool to tool while publish your content.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.