Tech Tools for Activism Workbook
Timed Cross-posting using Brdcst.it
Cross posting to blogs and social media can be a key part of your campaign. The process of building awareness about a campaign can use the tactic of releasing intresting data and facts on a regular basis, say once a day, as a way of building an audience and creating a groundswell of momentum for the campaign.
In this context, releasing a blog post and micro-blog update everyday for a month may be a very useful thing to set up and automate. If this could be useful to you follow this hands on to find out how to do it. While there are other ways of achieving this task we are going to do it using RSS feed and the a free software service called Brdcst.it as this is a solution that you may be able to adapt to your needs even if you don't use WordPress or Twitter.
Timed Posts in WordPress
If you want to create a post on a website or blog and for it to be published at a set time in the future this is possible in many different systems. We will look at doing this in WordPress.
Write your post and before clicking on Publish, click on the Edit link next to Publish immediately link
This will give the option to set a date. If you set it in the future your post will only appear on your website in when you reach that date and time.
You can see that it is simple to set a campaign to release information once a day or regularly.
Linking with Twitter and other services
While there are plugins to cross post to twitter (including Twitter Tools), we are going to use a different and more flexible solution. It is a Free Software service available for use or download at brdcst.it
Point your browser at brdcst.it and log in.
You can see that for the account above there are three feeds listed and 4 destinations.
In this example we will add a new feed from the WordPress website and and new destination in a new Twitter account.
Click on Add / Edit Destination
Now click on Add new destination
Choose Twitter from the list you are presented with.
You may be asked to authorise your Twitter account and when done your twitter link should appear in the list of destinations.
Adding a Feed
Now we will add the feed of our WordPress blog.
When you are logged into brdcst.it, click on Add / Edit Feed and then Add New Feed.
We are asked for the Feed URL. To get this point your browser to the home page of your website / blog, and add /feed to the URL in the address bar of your browser.
In this example we have campaignupdate.wordpress.com/feed: Copy this text and paste it into the box Feed URL.
Click on Next.
The next step is to set the format of the Text of our post (in this case to twitter.com).
The default here is set to be simply the Title of the post and the URL of the home of the Post. This seems a good default as it is unlikely we could fit the whole post into a tweet. If we wanted to give a credit to the authour we could alter it slightly to add that in as shown in the screen shot below.
Click on Next.
You are then asked to choose from a list of the destinations you have set up. As you can see you can choose to post to more than one destination.
Click on Save. You will see a summary of your settings.
Your feed is now set to automatically post to the destinations you have chosen.
Summary
In this hands on tutorial we have learned how to use a WordPress blog, brdcst.it account and Twitter account to set up an automatic publishing system to push out campaign info at preset times.
There are other tools available to do the kind of piping from one social network to another. These include Yahoo Pipes and IFTTT.com. However the brdcst.it service is also available as Free Software so if you needed to run this as a secure, anonymous service then that would be possible.