RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. You might encounter it as ‘Rich Site Summary,’ but the principle is quite the same. RSS feeds send in a notification to readers via RSS feed readers when a new post has been published on a site.
You check out the title and if you like what you see, you click on the link and are redirected to the site. Multiple this by as many feeds as you want and you have a portal where all the content you’d ever want comes to you.
Not many people know about RSS today and essentially the word on the street is RSS is dead, but that is not quite the case. RSS has a strong case to make a comeback and many loyal users argue that it is already well under way.
6 helpful marketing uses of RSS feeds
Marketers have been required to handle increasingly bigger volumes of information in order to do their jobs. Every so often a new platform pops up and pulls a sizable audience, which necessitates research, monitoring and analysis. Only adding to the daily grind.
RSS resolves this tension through excellent curation and automation. With our digital personas spread so thinly across the Internet, it makes sense to syndicate all disparate pieces of content into a single dashboard.
We’re here to show you the clever applications of RSS to your responsibilities, so that you can boost your own productivity.
Monitor social media mentions easily
Social media means a lot to a brand. It’s created a whole other branch of marketing – the so-called social media listening, which affects every part of branding, product positioning and messaging. As a source of insights, there’s no equivalent and the data is free. Of course, if you subtract the cost of running a social listening tool to mine it.
RSS can double as a relatively low-cost alternative to specialised social media listening tools in that RSS feed readers track social media accounts and profiles just as easily. It’s smart to follow your own social media channels to monitor overall engagement to each post without having to be on the platform.
Searches for keywords, product names, branded hashtags and handles also give you raw data on the brand’s overall performance.
Track specific Google searches
Google Alerts have a special place in the marketer’s toolkit.
They’re efficient. They’re intuitive to learn and master. They’re free of charge. One downside remains – they’re easy to overtake your inbox. The more Google Alerts you set up, the greater the volume of email notifications you invite into your inbox.
Keeping a work inbox orderly challenges even the most organised of us; another distraction might sink the ship. Google Alerts come with built-in RSS support, so you can directly subscribe to each Google search through your reader rather than have a cluttered email.
Subscribe for competitors’ channels
Competitor research is the bread and butter to any marketing strategy. Marketers parse through the digital footprint of their direct competition for insights and pointers. What can you adopt and what can you avoid? Competitors do a form of free marketing research on that front.
RSS gives you the opportunity to perform this monitoring across multiple platforms all in one place. Inoreader consolidates all of their Internet presence in your dashboard. What do we mean by that?
- You can subscribe to their newsletter discreetly through a service like Kill the Newsletter, which generates an RSS link and doesn’t give them your email address;
- You have all their social media accounts and pages all in one convenient spot, where you are able to monitor their activity and interactions with customers;
- You can follow their branded hashtags and social media searches featuring their brand and products;
- You can also subscribe to podcasts and YouTube channels.
Identify relevant topics for your audience
Marketing opens new channels of communication. At least good marketing should be. In a digital landscape where content remains king, you’re tasked with finding out what excites your audience. This is what you’d call tuning into your target audience’s frequency.
Through monitoring social media, industry publications and your competitors, you arrive at a rich mix of topics and concerns that produce social engagement.
What are your customers’ values? What do they hold as important? What do they need?
Not only does this research lead you to the specific content you should be creating, but also gives you ammunition in creating targeted ads and improving your value proposition.
Generate ideas for new blog content
Having all subscriptions in a single dashboard paints a bigger picture. You’re able to step back and see trends in the type of content others are publishing and promoting. Emerging trends signal what excites readers and gives you the greenlight to jump on the bandwagon.
Opportunity windows such as these often don’t last long. Immediate action makes all the difference in who benefits. Are you going to ride the wave as it picks up height or are you going to be known as a copycat, who’s beating a dead horse well past the idea was popular?
RSS gives you the bird’s eye view to notice trends and act much sooner. As a marketer, this is crucial in amplifying visibility and generating sales leads.
Follow blog comment feeds
Influencers are here to stay and naturally, marketing has to account to this shift in how customers accept recommendations and who they trust with their money.
Instagram first gave rise to this type of para-social marketing and other platforms are replicating the model in hopes of quick return on investment. A notable trend on TikTok sees musicians pay TikTok stars out of pocket to perform a dance to their songs in hopes of a viral challenge.
Whether you’re a brand or a creator, a social connection to your audience plays to your strengths. One way to identify influencers is to pay attention to the comment sections. Though not as active arenas as they used to be, comment sections for content you publish (doubly important for guest content) point towards active members of the community with clout. WordPress sites as well as Blogger blogs naturally support RSS feeds for their comment sections, which you can easily monitor through your dashboard.
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