Why & How I Built an Auto Retweet

Last month I setup an auto retweet, so that every tweet from @ignitedenver would be immediately reposted by @ethang (my personal twitter account). If that doesn’t make sense to you, you should start with a twitter primer, or learn about 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter first.

Why did I setup an auto retweet?

The answer is simple: last year I became an honorary member of the Ignite Denver Board of Organizers.  I volunteered to be the video director, and board membership was part of the gig.  So I am obliged to help promote the good name of Ignite Denver. By the way, It’s a fun event, and you should find your local Ignite group and get involved if you haven’t already. (Or, try Pecha Kucha, or even Toastmasters to practice your stagemanship.)

How did I setup an auto retweet?

It took me a little while to figure this out, but with a little help of a online tutorials (1,2), I figured out how to automatically retweet from one twitter account to another. Here are the two main steps:

1. First I setup a yahoo pipe, which grabs the @ignitedenver tweets, filters out all @ mentions and retweets, optimizes the syntax (adds AutoRT to all posts), and republishes it. You can see it in action here. And if you click on Get as RSS, then you can copy the RSS feed and setup your own auto-retweeter in the next step.
2. Next, you should browse on over to http://feedburner.google.com. if you don’t have an account, you can start one with any RSS feed (like the one mentioned above). Paste in your RSS feed location, follow the introductory steps, and soon you’ll see your full account options. Click on ‘Socialize’ at left and then ‘Publicize’ up top, and you’ll see the option to automatically publish the RSS feed to your twitter account. You’ll need to authorize feedburner’s use of your twitter account, and then activate the feed, and voila! It works!

If you’ve done this differently, please leave a comment and let us know how!