Combining Twitter Accounts

Feeling slightly techie today as Sunday evening was spent creating some Yahoo Pipes that are now in action.

I have a team of colleagues who have their own twitter accounts. They have a central account that they would like to tweet their tips from as well. But they needed a neater solution than logging in and out of the main account, worrying that they are posting foursquare check-ins etc that are irrelevant to those following the main account.

Feeding in all their content would not add value to the main account as a source of great tweets.

So the idea of a #TIP came up. If they tweet with that hashtag – it automatically posts to the central account.

Pipes lets you combine a number of RSS or API feeds – manipulate – and output as RSS or JSON.

Combining a series here I’ve managed to aggregate a teams Twitter feeds, and filter to those with the hashtag #TIP – ready to be fed to the main account of the team.

All About Anchor Text by @randfish ow.ly/8uFZ7 great #SEO #tip

— Nick Allen (@NickWAllen) January 16, 2012

 

The steps are:

1. Fetch (RSS feeds) 
2. Regex (alter regular expressions of the feed – change item.title replacing “username:” with “RT username” ) 
3. Union (after repeating 1 and 2 for all members – combine them)  
4. Create RSS (simply merges the lot to an RSS feed) 
5. Filter (searches the RSS feed for instances where the tweet contains #TIP) 
6. Pipe output (finishes the item) 

From there this RSS feed is posted to the main account using ifttt.com. 

I’m going to explore some more this week, as I’m sure there’s other good Pipes waiting to be created:

• Combine Blog, Twitter and Facebook feeds to create a news stream on a site. 
• RSS feed of top #Architecture tweets
• Combine Flickr accounts for backup to Dropbox
• Search your brand and email updates 
• Filter Youtube / blog for specific tags