Tool for journalists: dlvr.it, for auto-posting to social networks

Tool of the week for journalists: dlvr.it

What is it? A tool to let you push an RSS feed to social networks, including posting to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and App.net.

A paid-for option allows you to add various Twitter handles, mash them into one source, and add filters to provide an auto-curated Twitter stream or RSS feed.

How is it of use to journalists?

Okay, we know that we should be hand-curating our posts to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, but as journalists it can be time consuming to share stories manually.

Most news outlets auto-tweet stories as they are published, and few journalists manually post links of all their articles to LinkedIn.

This tool allows you to add an RSS feed and automatically post to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, Delicious and StatusNet.



One really useful feature is that you can add filters, so you only post items from the feed which include or exclude keywords. You can also prefix a post. For example, if I auto-post the jobs posted on Journalism.co.uk by adding the RSS feed, I can prefix tweets and LinkedIn posts with 'Journalist job'.



IFTTT (If This Then That), another free tool, also allows you auto-post to social networks from a feed and includes a keyword filter. Think of dlvr.it as a pared down version of IFTTT, focusing on RSS syndication rather than offering a whole range of other options for connecting platforms and services.

After launching more than three years ago, dlvr.it introduced a freemium model at the end of last year, and now charges for some features.

One of the paid-for options includes allowing you to create a mashup feed of a number of Twitter accounts. This means you can add Twitter handles (such as from other brands or people) and then add filters. For example, if I wanted to create an auto-posting Twitter feed of tweets of interest to freelancers, I could combine @NUJ_LFB and @journalism_jobs, filtering only jobs that contain the work 'freelance', and then post the combined feed from our @freelance_hacks channel.

There are other free dlvr.it features which are worth being aware of. You can use to schedule posts (as you can in TweetDeck or using Buffer).

You can also create and queue posts to send to your social networks by sending an email to dlvr.it.

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