I’ve spent the weekend testing the connectivity capabilities between a blog-based podcast and Twitter. I’ve come to the conclusion that by syncing your podcast episodes with Twitter, you increase your marketing/branding visibility with very little effort.
Twitter and Podcasts: How I Did It
Before recommending this to PodWorx customers (which I have since done), this weekend was all about making the Living in Las Vegas Podcast website Twitter-friendly. My primary goal was to create a “tweet” (a new Twitter message) whenever a new blog post or podcast episode presented itself. Because I use WordPress as the underlying platform for all our podcasts, I did a search for WordPress and Twitter and found several possible solutions. The solution I eventually went with is a plugin called Twitter Tools.
It just takes a couple minutes to configure Twitter Tools to work. Besides the option to send blog/podcast posts to Twitter, you can send Twitter posts to your blog, and create blog digest posts based upon Twitter activity. You can also display your most recent Twitter posts on your blog (in the sidebar, for example).
Extending the Reach
One of the things that impressed me about Twitter is its search capabilities. More to the point, its real-time search capabilities. The moment you post something on Twitter, it’s available within Twitter’s search tool. Very impressive. (You can subscribe to an RSS feed of a particular search term as well.) So, if I wanted people looking for information about Acme to find my latest Acme podcast episode, I would configure Twitter Tools to place “Acme Podcast:” before the title of the show that would have been captured from the blog/podcast. This is done simply by editing the plugin’s single PHP file.
That’s what I’ve done for both the Living in Las Vegas Podcast and this blog (here and here). Now, each time I post a new podcast/blog, it’s shared among the Twitter Throngs. Very cool.
I was a bit surprised by the amount of recon available from other Twitter users. I was especially interested in what I found when I did a search for the name of several companies I’m interested in. Fascinating feedback (good and bad) about these various companies. Finding that, I would strongly suggest you keep an eye on what folks are saying about you and your company. Could be very educational.
So the questions is, are you using Twitter? If so, here’s my Twitter URL. If not, take 15 minutes and look around. Go to the bottom of the page, click on “Search”, and see what’s being said about things that are important to you. Then, tell me what you think.