Making RSS Graffiti

Application Update!

We’re excited to announce the release of some major improvements to the look-and-feel of posts. Image thumbnails are now up to 60% larger. The “share” link on standard-style posts has been upgraded, and will now be translated to your local language. By popular request, the source: link has been removed.

Additionally, there are few changes to get ready for the launch of our premium add-ons. Scheduling options are located by clicking the clock icon at the top of each publishing plan. All post counts have been reset to zero, but from now on, more detailed logging will be available in the stats view.

If you don’t see these changes yet, they should appear on your dashboard in the next few days.

We’d love to hear your feedback! Feel free to drop us a line in our forum with any glowing praise, comments, or concerns. And keep checking the Facebook page for updates on our premium add-ons (coming soon!)

The RSS Graffiti Team

Coming Soon: RSS Graffiti Premium Features and a New Look

BIG changes are underway at RSS Graffiti. In May, you’ll notice our new look with an updated logo, website and Facebook app page. We’ll be giving away t-shirts to users who take a cool photo of our logo in an interesting location. Check out our Facebook page for updates!

Starting in May, we’ll also be offering two new premium paid features. Although we’ll continue to offer our basic features for free, the new premium features are specifically designed to help boost engagement with your audience, enabling you to deliver content to Facebook with more speed, flexibility, and insight than ever before. In addition, we will limit the number of FREE posts per Facebook target to 300 per month. For high volume publishers who need more than 300 posts per month (that’s 10 posts per day), we’re offering the Broadcast package, which includes up to 2000 posts per Facebook target page for a flat $5 monthly rate. After we officially launch the post limits in May, we’ll include a 30-day grace period for all current users who post more than 300 times per target page each month.

New Premium Features and Post Limit Package:

OPTIMIZE - $50 per month for ALL PUBLISHING PLANS!
Among a million other tasks, you must manage the creation, distribution AND performance of Facebook content. Optimize is designed with you in mind. Our actionable insights provide a visual guide to which content boosts engagement. This knowledge, paired with the new advanced scheduling tool, empowers you to quickly adjust campaigns, boosting engagement and improving the EdgeRank score of your posts.

• 14-day free trial.  Give it a try for FREE!
• Actionable Insights - Graphs, charts, scatter plots and easy to read visual data provide post and page performance data to help improve content performance and engagement
• Pull detailed analytics data (even non-RSS Graffiti data) from the past 90 days
• Advanced Scheduling for time-of-day and day-of-week
• Flat Fee for all publishing plans, pages, and groups you administer
• Includes Premium Email Support

EXPRESS PUBLISHING - $150 per month for unlimited usage
Express Publishing is built for distributing high-priority content like breaking news, important updates, and emergency messaging. Express is a priority lane for publishers who absolutely must push stories from their feed to Facebook in 5 minutes or less. With Express, you can trust that your posts will be updated up to 600% faster than our free 30-minute option.

• 14-day free trial.  Give it a try for FREE.
• VIP post prioritization
• Actual post times may be less than 2 minutes
• Monthly flat fee applies to all publishing plans managed by the account admin
• Includes Premium Email Support

BROADCAST - $5 per per month per Facebook target
Are you a high-volume publisher who uses RSS Graffiti to post more than 300 times a month to a single page? The Broadcast package is for you.

• Up to 2000 posts per Facebook target page per month for $5 bucks
• If you need more than 2000 posts per target per month, contact us and we’ll discuss on a case-by-case basis.
• Includes Premium Email Support

Please follow our blog, Twitter and Facebook page as we reveal more details. If you have questions about the coming changes, please visit our Community Support Forum. Someone from our team is standing by, happy to address any concerns you might have. 

Once again, thank you for using RSS Graffiti and for supporting our small but passionate team.

The RSS Graffiti Team
Blog: http://blog.rssgraffiti.com
Twitter: @rssgraffiti
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RSS.Graffiti

Post Limit Updates and the Premium Optimize Package

Last week we announced we’ll be offering two new Premium Features and new posting limits. We received a lot of feedback, including ideas on how we can continue to improve RSS Graffiti and support our ongoing efforts. We’re happy to have such a thoughtful and supportive community of customers and we’re making changes based on your input. Thanks!

Understanding that the needs of a breaking news organization differ from those of an individual blogger, we wanted to introduce a post frequency option that works for everyone. That’s why in May we’ll be launching a post package called Broadcast. With Broadcast, all customers will receive up to 300 posts per month to each Facebook target page for FREE. For our higher volume publishers, we’ll be offering up to 2000 posts per Facebook target page for a flat monthly fee of $5. For ANY user that wants to post more than 2000 posts to a single page in a month, please give us a shout and we will make exceptions to this limit on a case-by-case basis. Just like before, there will be a 30-day grace period so the limits won’t kick in immediately (posting will continue to be unlimited until June).

Our goal is to offer as much flexibility as possible while enhancing overall Facebook engagement for all of our users. That said, we’re also be offering a new premium feature called Optimize.  The Optimize package is designed with strategic content marketers and publishers in mind, and will help customers learn what content is most effective as well as when it’s most likely to be consumed. Optimize provides analytics for ALL your Facebook content, not just content posted via RSS Graffiti.  Moreover, the Optimize package includes an advanced scheduling tool which allows you to plan precisely when to distribute content. Optimize provides an easy way for all publishers to actively improve the performance of their content. We’re going to offer Optimize for $50 per month, and will come with analytics and advanced scheduling for ALL of your publishing plans.

In our next post, we’ll provide more details on Optimize as well as our other premium feature designed for Breaking and Urgent News publishers.

Please keep sending us comments and ideas and follow our blog, Twitter and Facebook posts throughout April as we reveal more details, including the premium feature benefits and pricing options. If you have questions about the coming changes, please visit our Community Support Forum. Someone from our team is standing by, happy to address any concerns you might have.

The RSS Graffiti Team

Blog: http://blog.rssgraffiti.com
Twitter: @rssgraffiti
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RSS.Graffiti

Coming Soon: RSS Graffiti Premium Features

Thanks for using RSS Graffiti. Customers like you have helped RSS Graffiti grow into the most powerful, flexible, and fully featured application in its class, generating more than a quarter billion impressions each day across hundreds of thousands of Facebook targets.

We want to continue improving RSS Graffiti with features that help our users build an engaged Facebook audience.  To support our ongoing efforts, we’ll be offering two new premium paid features. The new features are specifically designed to help you boost engagement with your audience, delivering content to Facebook with more speed, flexibility, and insight than ever before.

In addition, we will limit the number of FREE posts per Facebook target to 250 per month.  Post bundles after 250 will now be sold in tiers starting at $5 per Facebook target, per month (i.e. up to 500, up to 1500, etc.).  After we officially launch these features in May, we’ll include a 30-day grace period for all current users who post more than 250 times per target page, per month.

The majority of RSS Graffiti users will see NO CHANGE other than additional FREE features and the option to try the premium upgrades. For our high volume users, after the 30-day grace period ends in June, posting will stop after you hit the free 250 monthly post limit per Facebook target, unless you choose to purchase additional post bundles.

It’s important for us to repeat that the vast majority of our users will see NO CHANGE and will be able to continue using RSS Graffiti for FREE. Only those of you who post more than 250 times per month to a single Facebook page, profile or group will be affected by the changes.

Please follow our blog, Twitter and Facebook posts throughout April as we reveal more details, including the premium feature benefits and pricing options. If you have questions about the coming changes, please visit our Community Support Forum. Someone from our team is standing by, happy to address any concerns you might have.

Once again, thank you for using RSS Graffiti. We’re confident that our new premium features will prove valuable, adding robust new capabilities to an application that so many of you have grown to depend on. Thanks for your support!

The RSS Graffiti Team

Blog: http://blog.rssgraffiti.com
Twitter: @RSSGraffiti
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RSS.Graffiti

Posting Instagram hashtag feeds via RSS Graffiti

Instagram users!! Did you know there’s a public RSS feed for every hashtag on the popular photo sharing service? Using these feeds as a source, RSS Graffiti can automatically publish photos to your page, profile, or group whenever they’re uploaded to Instagram with a particular hashtag. Here’s how to get set up:

First, open up the publishing plan dashboard and create a new publishing plan. Select your profile or a page to use as the target. If you run into trouble, see our getting started guide.

Next, get the hashtag feed you want to publish. Use this format: http://instagram.com/tags/HASHTAG/feed/recent.rss replacing “HASHTAG” with your desired hashtag. For example, the feed for the hashtag #palmtrees would be: http://instagram.com/tags/palmtrees/feed/recent.rss

After adding this as your source URL, set your scheduling options, click save, and switch ON the publishing plan. The next time a photo is uploaded to Instagram with your chosen hashtag, RSS Graffiti will automatically publish it to Facebook. It really is that easy.

Now just imagine what you can do with these hashtag feeds: marketers can take advantage of crowdsourced content to engage their online audience, or a group of friends can automatically post moments from their spring break roadtrip. The possibilities are endless.

As always, if you need help posting from Instagram, or have questions about RSS Graffiti in general, please open a thread in our community support forum.

Posting Pinterest to Facebook via RSS Graffiti

Pinterest users!! Did you know RSS Graffiti provides an easy way to automatically publish your pins to Facebook? If you’ve already installed RSS Graffiti, setup is super easy. Just follow the steps below to begin posting your pins right away:

First, open up the publishing plan dashboard and create a new publishing plan. Select your profile or the page you want to use as the target. If you run into trouble, see our getting started guide.

The next step is getting the RSS feed for your Pinterest account. To get a feed of all your pinboards, use this URL for the source: http://pinterest.com/username/feed.rss replacing “username” with your actual username. To only publish pins from one board, use this URL: http://pinterest.com/username/board.rss replacing “board” with the name of the pinboard you’d like to publish. After adding the source URL, select your preferred scheduling options and click save.

That’s all it takes. Switch on the publishing plan, and next time you pin something, RSS Graffiti will automatically push it to Facebook with a beautiful image thumbnail and a link back to your Pinterest page. So easy.

If you need help posting from Pinterest, or using RSS Graffiti in general, please open a thread in our community support forum. Someone from the team will be happy to assist :)

Bitly shortening is now optional

More great news! We no longer require links to be shortened with Bitly. If you’ve never configured custom Bitly shortening, no further action is need. All your links will now be posted to Facebook in their full, unshortened form.

If you’ve previously added a custom Bitly account to track your clicks, shortening will continue to work normally.

Need help? As always, please point your questions to our Community Support Forum: http://getsatisfaction.com/rssgraffiti2

Application Update: Improved HTML Support!

More great news! We now have enhanced support for HTML formatting elements. These tags are now properly rendered:

Horizontal rule:

Ordered lists:

1. January
2. February
3. March

Unordered lists:

• Sushi
• Waffles
• Bacon

And other list types, including roman numeral and dictionary lists.

If you’ve posted something with the new formatting, we’d love to see it. Paste a link in the comments! As always, if you have any questions or need help, please open a thread in our Community Support Forum.

Check back tomorrow for yet another surprise! :D

Application Update!

In addition to a few minor bug fixes, we now support the option to check your feeds less frequently than once per day. You can have RSS Graffiti update your page with content every other day, or only once per week if you prefer. This commonly requested feature allows you to slowly trickle posts onto your wall, timeline or group. Useful if you have a backlog of content and want to keep your page fresh for as long as possible!

This update also includes another often-requested feature: a modest improvement in the “As Soon as Possible” update frequency. RSS Graffiti now publishes new posts more quickly after they’ve been added to a feed.

We hope you appreciate the recent changes! If you have any feedback or need help, please open a thread in our community support forum.

More great features to be announced tomorrow! :)

Posting Changes Coming

Recently, Facebook changed the visual appearance of their posts in a way which causes some problems for certain configurations of RSS Graffiti. We’ve been working on a fix to address these issues, and believe we will be ready to roll it out to production on either December 26 or December 27, 2012.

The changes will affect several aspects of the way posting from RSS Graffiti works, so please double check your posts after our deployment to ensure that things are working well for you.

The Facebook changes broke us in several ways:

1. When using the standard post style, if your post does not contain an image, our posts will contain an empty box where the image would normally appear.
2. Also with the standard style, the text from your item’s description will be truncated after only a couple of lines, without any kind of “See More…” link or way to see the rest of the text.
3. In the compact post style, the link to the full story and the source appear in a gray box, but are shifted to the right in a way that isn’t very visually appealing.

To address these issues, we’re planning to do several things differently in the future.

#1 and #3 will simply be fixed. The extra space in both cases will be removed.

However, for #2, we’ve decided to move the description text out of the grey box, and move it up into the text preceding the box. There are several advantages to this:

1. We can include a larger amount of text, and if it’s too long, Facebook will include a “See More…” link allowing you to see the rest.
2. We can support some rudimentary text formatting. In the past, we couldn’t do any formatting at all — which would lead to long, run-on blocks of description text. With these changes, we should be able to honor line breaks appropriately.
3. Most users of RSS Graffiti are trying to drive additional traffic to the original link, and prefer that we automatically truncate text beyond a certain length, which forces the user to follow the link for the full article. Based on this, we’re planning to include a 250-character limit on the description, in order to help drive traffic in the way many of you have requested.

We’re planning to release these changes next week, so if you have comments or questions, please visit the GetSatisfaction thread. You can also find several example pictures with Before/After versions.