HOW TO: Automatically Tweet (and FaceBook and LinkedIn and others) your eBid items.

[JohnPGalt]

I noticed that several people here recommend "tweeting" your items for sale through Twitter or posting your new items on FaceBook. I'm not sure if these people are doing this manually, going to Twitter and FaceBook every time they put a new item on eBid, or if they are using automation.

Automation is the way to go for this. There are several free services that will Tweet on Twitter, post to FaceBook, LinkedIn, MySpace and other social networks from a feed directly from eBid (called an RSS feed). If you use one of these services, your new items will automagically appear on your Twitter stream, your FaceBook wall, and any other social network you set them up for.

I use a free service called Deliver It ( http://dlvr.it/ ).

Here's how to use their service.

First, go to the website at http://dlvr.it/ and sign up for a free account. It's been a while since I did this. You use your email address to sign up. It sends you a verification email with a link in it to verify your email address and activate the account.

Next, find the RSS feed link for your items on eBid.

You might see an RSS icon in your browser's location bar when you are looking at the eBid page that lists all of your items. You can use that to go to the RSS feed for your items. Or, here's a shortcut. Use this link, but substitute your actual user name on eBid for the {Your_eBid_User_Name} part http://us.ebid.net/perl/rss.cgi?type...pe=user&words={Your_eBid_User_Name}

I think that format will work right now.

Go to your dlvr.it dashboard and click on the "+Add" button at the top of the "Sources" column on the left side. A box will pop up with the "Choose your source" dialog.



Click the "New" radio button, and more options will appear.



Paste your item RSS feed URL in the Feed URL field. Then click the "Save Source" button.

Dlvr.it has numerous options you can set for update frequency, item text, filters, scheduling and location. The defaults generally work well. You can look at those tabs and make changes later by "editing" the feed.

Next, you'll need at least one destination. You click the "+ Add" button at the top of the Destination column on the right. You'll get a menu of the social media sites that Dlvr.it can work with.



When you click the "New" button next to Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn or any of the other sites, you'll get an "Account" tab with an appropriate authentication/setup page to allow you to connect to that social media site. They are pretty self explanatory. If anyone has specific questions, I'll try to post some pictures and some how to help.

After you set up dlvr.it, all you have to do is put your items on eBid. On a regular schedule, dlvr.it checks your eBid item RSS feed and makes new Tweets, wall posts and so on for every new item you put on eBid. It's all automagic once you set it up. No more need to click the "Tweet" or "FaceBook share" button in eBid to send out notices to your social networks. Just add your items and dlvr.it takes care of the rest for you.

[bykimbo]

Useful information, although it's also worth mentioning that a lot of us will automatically unfollow anybody who over-shares adverts. I can be interest in a couple of ads from friends now and again, but if anybody's just spamming everything they list I drop them pronto, I'm afraid.

[suesjools]

I manually tweet listings myself, not all that many, but I do try to tweet from time to time.

Best wishes for many sales to all,

[JanetB]

Useful information, although it's also worth mentioning that a lot of us will automatically unfollow anybody who over-shares adverts. I can be interest in a couple of ads from friends now and again, but if anybody's just spamming everything they list I drop them pronto, I'm afraid.

I'm with Kim on this one.
I don't mind 1 or 2 ads from a friend on FB (occassionally) but when I get a long list of them (more than 5) per day, that is just out and out spamming, then I will also block them from my feed.

[JohnPGalt]

Thanks for the replies.

What I actually do is I have a Twitter account for my online auctions/sales everywhere. It's definitely very spammy, but I have a few close friends and regular customers who follow that account. Then, I have a personal Twitter account. On that twitter account, I use RSS feeds from various discussion boards and forums where I post to feed it, along with my own content from my blog and other miscellaneous tweets. I follow my own sales/spam account, and sprinkle in an occassional retweet from my sales/spam Twitter account. My good friends and great regular customers also occasionally throw in a retweet from the sales/spam account that tweets everything.

Google sees all. So my items rank better in Google searches first because they are the subject of Tweets on Twittter and LinkedIn posts. Those accounts have a few followers, so they don't look like totally orphaned losers. And the fact that some small number of the entries on the sales account get retweeted seems to make the whole account look more interesting to Google and the other search engines.

Oh, and I guess I should update the opening post here. You can also hook dlvr.it to an RSS feed from a store, rather than from your whole eBid account. So you could have a "closeouts/specials" store and only Tweet/FaceBook/LinkedIn from that store. That could be another way to be much less spammy and have less advertising in your Twitter and FaceBook streams.

[bykimbo]

Thanks for the replies....
Oh, and I guess I should update the opening post here. You can also hook dlvr.it to an RSS feed from a store, rather than from your whole eBid account. So you could have a "closeouts/specials" store and only Tweet/FaceBook/LinkedIn from that store. That could be another way to be much less spammy and have less advertising in your Twitter and FaceBook streams.

(snipped for size only)

Again, good info. I hope some of the "I don't do social networking" people will read this and see how things can be structured to do much of the work for you if you wish.