Back in December 2009, Google added a new Socialize option in FeedBurner to help web publishers automatically publish their RSS feeds to Twitter. You simply had to connect your Twitter account to FeedBurner and a tweet would be sent out as soon as any new article became available in your feed.

Two years later, it looks like Google has silently dropped Twitter integration from FeedBurner as the Socialize option is no longer available in your FeedBurner dashboard.

Getting Twitter back into FeedBurner

While the Social option is no longer available in FeedBurner, you can still get it back though a URL based hack.

1. Log into your your Feedburner dashboard at feedburner.google.com and open any of your feeds.
2. Now go to the browser address bar and replace the word “dashboard” with “socialize” and hit Enter.

This should enable the Socialize option in your FeedBurner dashboard again. While you are here, you may want to remove your Twitter accounts that are configured to auto-publish your FeedBurner Feeds.

Publish RSS Feeds to Twitter – Alternatives

If you have been using FeedBurner to publish your RSS Feed to Twitter, it’s now time to make a switch. You have a couple of good options to choose from:

1. Twitter Feed – You can use Twitter Feed to publish your blog feed to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn simultaneously. It even lets you publish the same RSS feed to multiple Twitter accounts in one go. Twitter Feed is part of Bitly, the popular URL shortener service, but you can also use other URL shortening services as well.
2. Dlvr.it  - This is short for Deliver It. Dlvr.it supports blog publishing to all the popular social networks – including Twitter – and you can also route your post to different social networks based on keywords or tags associated with that post. They have a workaround to publish RSS feed to Google Plus as well though it’s not officially supported.
3. IFTTT – This is the newest kid in the block that can do much more than just publishing your blog to Twitter. You create “recipes” around your RSS feed and then trigger tasks based on content of your feed items. Not as straightforward as Twitter Feed or Dlvr.it but extremely powerful.

What do I use?

In my previous WSJ story on blogging, the first point I suggested was to stop auto-posting. That’s because the engagement levels on social networks are always higher if you “craft these status messages manually instead of resorting to the help of a bot.”

What I have done is linked my Facebook Page to my blog’s Twitter account with the help of this app. I publish stories on my Facebook page manually and as soon as I do that, a tweet is sent out automatically. This arrangement seems to be working well so far.