Once you've set up an RSS feed, you can use it as a resource to manually post updates as needed, or you can set up an RSS autoposter so that updates made to an RSS feed are automatically published to your social profiles.

Take a look

Create an autoposter

1. To start, in the Content > RSS feeds area of the dashboard, select the RSS feed in the list to the right. In this example, we use the Moz marketing blog curated RSS feed.
2. Next, click the New Auto Post button.

Basic setup

To take advantage of the autoposter feature, you will need to choose some basic settings to begin.

1. Ensure you are on the correct feed by checking the name in the 'Selected feed' field.
2. Next, in the 'Post to' field, select the social media profiles to which you wish to have the RSS feed published automatically.
3. The 'Update frequency' field allows you to select how often the feed will be checked for updates. This is a highly misunderstood field. Checking the feed often does not mean posts will be published often if no new items have been added to it. Depending on your goals, it's recommended that the update frequency should be similar to how often new items are added to the feed.
4. Next, you can choose from 'Scheduled', 'Draft', or 'Queued'. Scheduled will send a post out when an item is picked up based on the update frequency and other settings you've selected. It does not publish posts immediately when new items are added to the feed. To have more control over if and when posts are sent out, you can instead choose to have posts added to your Drafts view or a Queue.
5. The 'Number of entries to publish' allows you to select the maximum amount of updates to be published at one time.
   Caution: This can be affected by the number of new items that have been added to the RSS feed within the chosen 'Update frequency' timeframe.
   
   For example, if you've selected to publish two updates every day and you set the autoposter to publish only new entries, but only one item has been added to the RSS feed over the past day, only one post will be published.
6. You can turn on or off the 'Alert me when posts are published' option to choose whether you want to receive an email when posts from the RSS feed are sent out.
7. By selecting whether a feed is 'Active' or 'Paused', you can temporarily disable an autoposter without deleting the settings you’ve added.

Advanced options

Using the Advanced Options will help you control what content from the feed is included and how your post will look when published. 

1. The 'Type of posts to share' field has two options:
   • Any—Any post in the feed is eligible to be used.
   • New Posts Only—Only posts from the RSS feed that have a <pubDate> within the past 14 days and have not already been published by the RSS autoposter will be used.
2. You can choose what information from the RSS feed is used to compose the posts using the 'Post the following content' setting.
3. 
   • Title and Link—This option is best if you're posting to several social sites that don't require media, as the character count is kept low and all basic information is included in the post.
   • Title and Description—This option is good for blogs like WordPress, where you want to include your own image. We'd also suggest having updates saved to your Drafts view (see information on adding drafts above) first so you can easily attach an image and publish the update.
   • Title, link and image—This option is best when posting to sites that require images.
   • Title, description, link and image—This is another good option when posting to several social sites, as long as they allow for a longer character count, such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
   • Description, link and image—This option is similar to the above but might be preferable if you want to make posts look a little more organic.
   • Description only—This, and the two options below, are mainly useful if you're not planning to post full content but are instead looking for content ideas to use later. If you're selecting any of these options, we'd suggest having updates saved as drafts so that you can review the content and add to it at a later date before it's published.
   • Link Only—See 'Description only' above
   • Title Only—See 'Description only' above
4. The 'Shorten Links' option allows you to shorten the URL attached to a post.
5. Use the 'Repeat Posts' option to select whether posts that have already been published through the autoposter can be repeated.
6. Use the 'Posting Sequence' to set whether you want the system to send posts in order of newest first or if you’d prefer the system to post updates in random order.
7. The text you add to the 'Prefix each post with' text box will appear at the beginning of every post brought through from the RSS feed. If needed, remember to add a space at the end.
8. The text you add to the 'Suffix each post with' text box will be included at the end of every post. 

Filters and Google Analytics

1. You can add keywords to the 'Inclusion filter' or 'Exclusion filter' fields to control which posts from an RSS feed are selected. For example, if an RSS feed mentions a competitor, you can add their name to the 'Exclusion' filter, and then any updates that include their name will not be used. To ensure that only posts with certain words, for example, your brand name, add those words to the 'Inclusion' filter.

   If you want to include multiple filters, separate your filter terms with commas, eg. "dogs, cats" which will filter the title and body of items in the feed for either the word dogs OR cats.

2. You can also add Google Analytics tags to track links published through the RSS feed.

Once you’ve added your settings, click Save, and the autoposter will get to work.