Promote your site using Twitter

Jack Lail in Knoxville turned us onto Twitterfeed, a (free) service that will take an RSS feed and push it out over Twitter. Ya'll have heard of Twitter, right?

I know everyone is all hyped up on TextCaster right now - and it's great for a lot of things - particularly email alerts. But it costs money. And you have to physically perform an action each time you want to send out an alert.

Twitter and Twitterfeed are automatic.

How to get started:

1. Create an official newspaper Twitter account at Twitter.com. We're at twitter.com/ndn; Knoxville is at twitter.com/knoxnews. Check us out.
2. Head over to Twitterfeed. You can log in to Twitterfeed using any one of a number of OpenID logins, like a Yahoo account. Tell the service what RSS feed you want to push to a specific Twitter account.
3. Twitterfeed will automatically shorten the RSS headline's URL using one of three web services; we use TinyURL. As of right now, even if you put in the feed from your mobile site (m.naplesnews.com), the headline goes to your main site. (www.naplesnews.com). This is irritating, but I haven't found a way around it; if anyone does, please let me know.
4. You've also got 20 characters in front of the message you can play with. We are experimenting with putting an advertising URL there - "Visit SetAnchor.com" - and yes, it does make it a hyperlink.
5. Twitterfeed will take up to 12 hours to pick up the first items from your feed.

We're pushing our Local News headlines out right now, but we may do a combined feed in the future and add items. There's a definite Twitter overload point at about 20 per person per day.

Advantages of Twitter & Twitterfeed:
1. Free
2. Simple
3. No human intervention required
4. Reaches a young, mobile audience you might not be getting now


Disadvantages
1. Technological barrier; it's dratted hard to explain Twitter to anyone under 40, and some people in their 20 don't get it
2. You do have to sign up for Twitter to get the alerts
3. No clear monetization opportunity (even Twitter suffers from this problem)
4. You're totally dependent on not one, but two outside services, both of which had displayed issues with scalability in the past. Twitter especially is becoming famous for its outages.