Automatically Create Social Drafts from New Blog Posts (RSS)

You write the blog, then forget to announce it

After updating a shop's news or the company blog, you want to announce it on social media too. But by the time the article is finished, you've used up your energy and the social post becomes "later." A few days pass and you've missed the chance to announce it at all.

The other problem is that the announcement keeps changing shape. Some days it is just the title, other days a long intro, and the impression of the whole account becomes inconsistent. "Drafts from RSS" is a feature in which SNS TOWN notices that an article has appeared and prepares a draft in a set format.

What is RSS?

RSS is a way for blogs and news sites to publish a "list of new articles" in a form machines can read. Many blogs, such as WordPress, Hatena Blog and note, publish it automatically. SNS TOWN can read both RSS 2.0 and Atom.

When you register, even if you don't know the RSS URL, you can just enter the URL of the blog's top page. We look for the RSS location written in the page and find it automatically. If it can't be found, "No feed found" appears, so check the RSS URL in the blog's settings and enter it again.

How to register

Open "Drafts from RSS" under "Material" in the left menu, then enter the blog's URL and choose the social account the drafts will be created for. We read it once when you add it, and register it after confirming that it can be read.

One company or brand can register up to 10. You can split them by what you want to announce, such as the company blog, the shop's news and a recruiting blog.

Set the format of the draft

The draft body is built to the format you set. The initial format is "article title" and "article URL" on two lines. You can rewrite this format freely up to 1,000 characters, and also add a fixed line before the title, such as "We've updated the blog." If you use the same phrasing again and again, it tidies up nicely when you think about it together with Templates.

For the article URL, you can choose whether to put it in as it is or turn it into an SNS TOWN short link. With a short link, the post's page shows "Link clicks." A short link also gets a marker (UTM) automatically, so tools like Google Analytics can tell which social network the visitor came from. Details are in Short URLs and Click Counts.

Checks every hour, and a person decides what goes out

Registered blogs are checked every hour. If there are new articles, up to 3 drafts per blog are created in a single run, oldest article first. This prevents too many posts from the same day lining up on social media, even on a day when dozens of articles were published at once. From the 4th article on, they are remembered as "seen."

The drafts that are created get the "RSS" tag and line up under Awaiting approval. A provisional posting time is entered, which is a round hour at least 2 hours after creation (between 9:00 and 21:00 Japan time). If an article appears in the middle of the night, 9:00 the next morning is entered. If 2 or more are created in the same run, they are staggered by an hour each.

What matters here is that drafts don't go out automatically. You look at the content, fix the text if needed, and approve it, and only then does it become scheduled. This keeps typos in the blog, or articles not worth announcing, from going out on social media as they are.

What to watch for on each network

Depending on the network a draft goes to, drafts created from RSS may need an extra step before approval.

On X, posts with a URL in the body are less likely to be recommended, so the SNS TOWN pre-post check stops URLs in posts not written by a person. Drafts created from RSS are treated the same way. When you use it with X, remove the URL from the format and write something like "Read it from the link in our profile." What the check covers is in Pre-Post Check.

Pause or remove

For a registered RSS feed, you can change the destination account, the format and whether to use a short link afterward. Turn off "Check every hour" to stop reading, and use "Check now" to read without waiting for the hour. When you no longer need one, "Remove" deletes the registration. Drafts already created stay.

When a feed couldn't be read, the reason is shown on its registration row, such as the blog being down, no response in 10 seconds, or the feed being too large (up to 2 MB). Also, while you have Pause all scheduled posts on, RSS isn't read either.

To understand the flow from a created draft to publishing, read the guides Saving a Draft and Approving or Skipping a Draft too.

Frequently asked questions