You’ve probably had to downsize and cut costs on company operations due to the pandemic. You wouldn’t be the only one to have to do more with less than before.
The pressure definitely falls onto marketers to swoop in and save the day, but you need the right tool for the job.
One low-cost way to jumpstart your marketing and improve your social media marketing is to turn to RSS feed readers. They pack quite the punch these days and with a little bit of imagination you can accomplish quite a lot.
What is an RSS feed reader?
RSS feed readers are clients, which crawl over multiple websites simultaneously and retrieve new posts to a single dashboard. It’s a simple form of syndication, which has existed since the start of the Internet itself. RSS feeds are XML-based format for your website content and are located in a site’s source code.
Feed readers can be browser based, but are now mostly available as applications to download. You might even have a tough time making the right choice.
Is RSS still an important marketing tool?
Marketers realized the potential of RSS to drive forward corporate marketing strategies. That was then and you have to remember that RSS readers were a lot simpler back then. Now RSS readers are well developed and have many more features, which broaden the set of actions a marketer can perform.
The biggest obstacle is the dwindling support for RSS as not many sites nowadays have RSS feeds to begin with. Mozilla Firefox officially stopped support for RSS, so it seems RSS is obsolete, but there are means to circumvent this challenge.
6 ways to use RSS in social media marketing
Social media marketing boils down to conversations. It’s wrong to see social media platforms as a dumping ground for your links and promotions without much else thought in how you reach your customers.
Brands should know how to speak to their audience, what excites their audience and what is taking place in their industry. RSS gives marketers the tools to follow news and trends, and perform deep research on as many subjects as they want.
Here are some of the things you can accomplish through RSS.
1. Easily distribute blog content
RSS still has its proponents even though it’s not as popular as it once was. Therefore, you have a chance to reach an even bigger audience by adding RSS feeds to your blog, e-store and other pages for information. The conversation surrounding the revival of RSS has been going on for the past three years and it’s gaining traction.
Unlike social media, where you have to promote your content tirelessly and strategize when to do it, RSS distributes blog content automatically and leaves it up to the reader to decide when to see it. You can rest assured no one will miss a title on RSS compared to the fickle algorithms of social media.
2. Search for topics your audience read
By monitoring social media for brand mentions you stumble on potential or existing customers – a fantastic resource in understanding your target audience and developing their buyer persona. Make it a point to follow customers online to understand where they prefer to spend their time and what type of content excites them. A luxury brand servicing C-level professionals will have to know their way through a wildly different set of topics compared to an affordable eco-friendly brand. RSS is where you can learn all about your customers’ interests.
3. Compare with others
Competition research is among the building blocks of marketing as you’re able to investigate what works for your competitors and get some takeaways for your future ventures. You share a common audience so it’s a given certain types of messaging and content will have the same level of success for your brand as well. RSS readers have proven themselves as adequate tools for social listening – more than enough to monitor not just your competitor’s online presence, but also their content channels and social media accounts to establish their communication style.
4. Track specific searches relevant to your industry
RSS has evolved beyond syndicating content wholesale. Users are now able to narrow down their search through subscriptions to Google searches for Google News and Google Alerts. Rather than have to scroll through general feeds to spot the nugget of information you need, you can skip right to news that matters to you. This way users can discern what feeds are worth their time and further declutter their online reading.
Inoreader further empowers users with a powerful discovery mode and an active search, which you can fine tune however you want and will continue to return results until you decide to disable it.
5. Subscribe for industry news
An important part of marketing research involves tracking overall industry trends and patterns that have a direct effect on a brand’s performance on the market. RSS readers can index as many feeds of news sites and trade publications, which in turn reveal the bigger picture. You’re able to prepare for upcoming challenges and seize new opportunities to sell your products better. To that end, we also recommend you populate your readers with general marketing sites to keep evolving no matter what new tools and techniques emerge.
6. Identify influencers
Turning your RSS reader into a tool to monitor your social media presence leads you to the people that matter most to your brand and industry as a whole. Tracking brand mentions, especially non-directed ones, reveals the power customers who naturally promote your content. These are brand ambassadors in the making and a low-cost marketing channel to promote products.
Harnessing Twitter in particular reveals the industry influencers. You have ways to generate RSS feeds for just about everything from twitter lists to even what tweets a user likes for a deep dive. Inoreader also supports Twitter feeds and gives you easy means to get the job done.
