Overview of RSS feeds and autoposters
Autoposters are an excellent way to keep content flowing on your social media profiles. However, it's important to set up your autoposter correctly. The RSS feed and autoposter are interconnected and they need to work together for best results.
Things to know
- Find the RSS feeds and autoposters in your dashboard under Content > RSS feeds.
- You can review and manually share items from a website's RSS feed.
- Autoposters allow you to automatically share updates from RSS feeds.
Use a valid RSS feed
There are different types of RSS feeds and more than one way to set them up. They can often, but not always, be found by adding /feed or /rss to the end of a website's URL, eg., https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/feed/. You can check your RSS feed for any possible issues using a free feed-validation service like https://validator.w3.org/feed/.
<pubDate> defined for it to work with an autoposter. If it does not, you can review and share items from the feed directly.Autoposter settings
The settings for an autoposter interact with one another and the feed itself. It can be like getting the teeth on gears to mesh for best performance, and it can take a bit of time to fine-tune. The settings most likely to impact the delivery of posts are found below.
Posting frequency
When setting up an autoposter, you'll see that you have the option to set the 'Update frequency'.
You don't need to set this to update too frequently, as there are a limited number of items in any RSS feed, and the autoposter only works with items published in the past 14 days. Posting similar content too often could potentially flag your social account for inauthentic posting behaviour.
If the RSS feed you're working with publishes new articles multiple times per day, you can set it to publish more frequently than if it only publishes, say, once a week. Checking the feed more frequently than items are added is not necessary.
Number of entries to publish
This is the number of items that will be published at one time. Depending on the cadence of new items added to the feed and the update frequency you've set, it can space posts out over time or publish them all at once.
'Post the following content' options
The elements included in each item are defined by HTML tags within the RSS feed itself.
You can choose which elements to include in the posts from the autoposter.
Title with link
Just the <title> and <link> to the item are included in the post, similar to when a link is entered in the compose box.
Title and description
Only the <title> and <description> of the item are used.
Title, link and image
The <title>, <link>, and the og:image or the first suitable <img src=""> available for the item.
Title, description, link and image:
The <title>, <description>, <link>, and the og:image or the first suitable <img src=""> available for the item.
Description, link and image
The <description>, <link>, and the og:image or the first suitable <img src=""> available for the item.
Description only
The <description> of the item with a link.
Link only
Just the <link>. No title or anything else for the item.
Title only
Just the <title>. No link or anything else for the item.
Repeat posts
'Don't Repeat' will allow the autoposter to process items in the feed just once. 'Posts Can Repeat' will make all items available for processing by the other settings for the autoposter. The autoposter only works with items published in the past 14 days.
Posting sequence
'Newest first' will pull the most recent item from the feed for the autoposter. 'Random' will choose a random post from the previous 14 days.
Prefixes and suffixes
Under 'Advanced Options', you can add a prefix and/or a suffix to your posts. This is recommended to help your posts avoid being flagged as duplicates and to make them appear more authentic. Separate each word or phrase with a pipe ( | ) character.
Inclusion and exclusion filters
Past the 'Advanced' options, you'll find the 'Inclusion' and 'Exclusion' filters, which allow you more control over the posts your autoposter picks up from your RSS feed. It is a way to ensure your autoposter publishes only posts relevant to your audience.
FAQs
Which social sites work with autoposters?
An autoposter can publish posts to any social profile you choose but remember that each social site has its own validations/requirements for the type of posts it allows. So, in some cases, your autoposter may be creating posts exactly as you intended, but the posts may be failing for other reasons.
One common reason autoposter posts fail is that the image included in the post, which is pulled from the RSS feed, doesn't meet the social site's requirements. This is most common for Instagram, which has stricter requirements regarding the types of images you can include in your posts.
For this reason, we usually recommend excluding Instagram profiles from autoposters, especially if the RSS feeds aren't under your control. However, if you have control of the feed on which you've created the autoposter, then you can make sure you use the right images for the social sites to which you wish to post. See the article on Image requirements for each social platform for further details.
How can I change the RSS autopost default image?
By default, when posting using the RSS auto-poster, Sendible takes the first suitable image it finds on the web page. However, there are WordPress plugins you can install to make sure that the og:image headers are included in your posts. This way, Sendible will use the chosen og:image when posting the link to most social networks.
Here is an example of a WordPress plugin you could use:
You can learn more about the Open Graph meta tags that you should include with each post in this article:
Have more questions?
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