Social Media Strategy | Online PR | Proactive Report | Sally Falkow

The Proactive Reports is a blog about social media strategy, shifts in media consumption and online PR trends

Sally Falkow - Social Media Strategist

RSS and syndication

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The hottest web content strategy out there

If you’ve been noticing the proliferation of those  little orange buttons appearing all over websites, you’ve probably been wondering what they are and what they do.  

They facilitate the hot new web content strategy called syndication.

And to clear up some of the confusion on the subject, here are some definitions:

Syndication is a process of providing your content to others, doing updates of information and generally spreading your content from one place to another.  One example you may be familiar with is syndication in newspapers. You sometimes see a column that appears in several papers at once.  It is syndicated.

Online syndication has many advantages:

  • it vastly improves your site’s visibility
  • makes your content available in a more convenient manner
  • feeds your content directly to interested parties
  • broadens your reach on the Internet
  • you’re constantly in front of your audience
  • drives traffic to your site
  • increases brand awareness
  • increase links, which positively affects search ranking

RSS/XML/Atom are the technologies that make syndication possible

RSS is Real Simple Syndication

Atom is another name for a syndication feed

XML is Extensible MarkUp Language – the underlying technology both RSS and Atom are built on.

Syndication uses RSS to set up automated updates, distribution of news items and information from your favorite websites.

It’s a great time saver – people are very busy,   their email is overloaded.  They may not remember to visit your site, even though they bookmarked it.

It can also be used to send out info, press releases and articles to interested journalists or websites that may want to use your content and link back to you.  It’s also a way to update prospective clients on your latest news.

If you write newsletters or articles, have product updates and specials, an RSS feed is a hot content strategy.

All your audience needs to get your feeds is  a news reader or aggregator

A news reader, or aggregator is a program or a website that automatically checks your list of bookmarked sites (which you only have to set up once) and lets you know what’s new on each site in your list.

So the next time you see one of these little orange buttons, you’ll know you are on the site of a savvy web marketer who is ahead of the pack.

If you like their content, subscribe to the RSS feed. 

And if you want stellar results from your website, use RSS feeds to syndicate your own content.

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