Twitterfeed Alternatives

I was approached by a friend with a question about her Feedburner account.

Feedburner worked fine as it streamed updates into her gadgets on Google Homepage.

But Feedburner wasn't working that great streaming into her Twitter account.

The issue isn't Feedburner here, it's Twitterfeed. Twitter, which is notorious for having all sorts of downtime, is a (shaky yet) necessary weapon in your daily campaign in social networking war! Whatever you are feeding into Twitter, that's your ammo. And your ammo has to be true and not misfiring. Maybe you need to change your brand of ammunition.

Sidebar.
This scenario is similar to that of when I help others create sites and blogs, they take a look at what everybody else is using and write it down. Perhaps with the thought, "Well if they have it, then I must need it too!" No. The answer for that will always be no. You never want to overdo it. Also, you should actually check out and research the application that you are inquiring about prior to actually asking for it! Or just focus on the functionality that you seek and have your developer suggest your options to you. Just because something SEEMS to work for one site owner, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will work for you or you won't need it. So, think about it before jumping into it!

You can use another status / microblogging system like FriendFeed and have import your blog's feed and update your Twitter page at the same time.

Twitterfeed has stepped up their game but the service is still not delivering 100%. I don't know if that's on TF's end or Twitter's. Regardless you need a backup. Consider services Pingfm, Hellotxt, or RSS2Twitter. And there are a number of other third party twitter applications that allow you to inject, Which are all good. Each of these services can send your items to your twitter page. But the downside of that is that now you have more to keep up with! But what is probably your best (meaning less to keep up with and still achieving the functionality) is Facebook.

Facebook takes notes from all of the best functions that other social networks have (and the apps that you develop for it). And then Facebook copies that app and creates an official app for it. There are a hand full of apps you can use on Facebook to update your status via Twitter. The Facebook / Twitter Link application works similar. A site owner can apply this to a Facebook Fan Page (which you should already have) and when you update the page, the update sends to your Twitter status! So if this works like I think it does (sometimes... * shrugs * ), then if you are importing your blog's feed into your Fan Page, when your blog's feed updates, your fan page will update and ultimately send the update to your Twitter status.

These are just a few alternatives off the top of the head and you may need to try them all (or others) out. Let me know how it works out for you!