Understanding RSS and Its Transformative Role in Content Marketing

If you are a content curator or a content marketer, you probably use RSS, even if you don’t even realize it! Social media professionals are constantly looking for great content to share, with the intention to build their reputation and convert their followers to customers. In order to do this, they drive traffic to interesting or helpful content to deliver value through social media. One of the most challenging parts of this process is finding the best content to share. To solve this problem, most people use a tool that offers streams of content that they can sort through to find the best articles, videos, and images.

Whether people realize it or not, most of those tools are built on top of RSS feeds. RSS (which stands for Rich Site Summary) is a standardized way for a website to tell a computer what content is on the website. For the techies out there, it’s an extension of xml, a language used to transfer data, frequently used in web-based APIs. What that basically means is that it is possible to write a computer program that can understand what content is available on a site if that site features an RSS feed. And thus, RSS readers are born.

So what does that mean for you? It means you can use a great app like feedly to browse the content from all of your favourite sites all in one place. This is even more powerful than most people realize; did you know that Facebook creates RSS feeds out of all their pages and notifications? Every major publication has an RSS feed – and so does almost every blog (don’t believe me? Here’s the Sniply RSS feed: https://sniply.wordpress.com/feed/). Using all these feeds, you can pull in all of the online information you actually care about into one place for easy browsing – what a time-saver!

The time-savings become even better when you think about curating content. Not only can you see all of the best content all in one place, but apps like Buffer’s Feeds or Hootsuite Syndicator allow you to immediately share that content across your social networks. Content curation has never been so easy!

But if you get that far, wouldn’t it also be great to be able to measure the ROI (return on investment) you get from curating that all of that content for your followers? With Sniply Feeds, now you can! Sniply Feeds allow you to automatically snip entire streams of content so that you can generate an ROI on your curation without changing your workflow at all. All you need to do is a little set up:

1. Tell Sniply which websites have content that you like to share
2. Sniply will generate a feed of that website’s content, but replace the links to the content with Snips featuring your message and call-to-action on top of the content.
3. Hook up the feed Sniply generated to your sharing app of choice and share from the Sniply feed as you would any other feed.

If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of setting up a Sniply Feed, check out the instructions here.

This enables you to provide value to your followers through great content curation while simultaneously capitalizing on your social capital without changing your workflow – now that’s a win-win. And it’s all thanks to the power of RSS!