# 'CycleChat Social' question



## Shut Up Legs (20 Jan 2015)

@Shaun, your announcement about this new feature said that some of our posts will appear on various social media sites. Will we be consulted before these posts get copied to these sites?

Regards,

--- Victor.


----------



## Shaun (20 Jan 2015)

victor said:


> @Shaun, your announcement about this new feature said that some of our posts will appear on various social media sites. Will we be consulted before these posts get copied to these sites?



No, the set-up is automated and uses the posts that you all make here in the public parts of the forums. It utilises the existing public RSS feeds - identified by this icon -




- all of which are visible to members, guests and indexed by search engines, etc.

Whole discussions are not posted, just the first post of new threads. Currently in the following configuration:

*General Cycling Discussions* - Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr
*Health, Fitness and Training* - Wordpress
*Touring and Expedition* - Blogger

The posts are all branded as CycleChat and link back to the full discussion here at the forums. The objective is to put our content in front of new audiences to attract new members.

Because I still run the forums in my spare time, I sometimes need to use services and tools that automate things, stuff that I would otherwise do manually if I ran the forums full-time (my long-term goal). This is something new I'm trying and may or may not continue into the future (in this automated form). We'll see how it goes. I'm still looking at various options, including alternative software / manual submission so if things change I'll let you know.


----------



## Berk on a Bike (21 Jan 2015)

On twitter the automated syndicating software takes the original post and truncates it to barely 50 characters, making them look robotic and hardly click bait. The URL takes up only 32 characters regardless, so there is room to expand. Explore the possibility of adding hashtags so you broadcast outside your immediate following.

I publish a paper.li publication every evening based on the links in my feed, most of which are cycling-related. Now I'm following CC's twitter feed some links may pop up in that. My "readership" is tiny but it may drive a bit of traffic your way.

PS add a bio to your twitter account


----------



## slowmotion (21 Jan 2015)

Shaun said:


> . The objective is to put our content in front of new audiences to attract new members.



It will attract a whole lot of fruit cakes, trolls and bucket mouths who have no interest in two wheels too. I'm all for spreading the message but feeding into Twitter is a bit "promiscuous" perhaps?


----------



## Shaun (21 Jan 2015)

Berk on a Bike said:


> On twitter the automated syndicating software takes the original post and truncates it to barely 50 characters, making them look robotic and hardly click bait. The URL takes up only 32 characters regardless, so there is room to expand. Explore the possibility of adding hashtags so you broadcast outside your immediate following.
> 
> I publish a paper.li publication every evening based on the links in my feed, most of which are cycling-related. Now I'm following CC's twitter feed some links may pop up in that. My "readership" is tiny but it may drive a bit of traffic your way.
> 
> PS add a bio to your twitter account



Thanks - the current feed software doesn't shorten URLs and because it's automated there are no tags; so I'm aware its not particularly good formatting, but it's a start.

There's also potentially too much stuff going out each day so I'm still reviewing other options, one of which uses a URL shortener and allows for tagging.



slowmotion said:


> It will attract a whole lot of fruit cakes, trolls and bucket mouths who have no interest in two wheels too. I'm all for spreading the message but feeding into Twitter is a bit "promiscuous" perhaps?



This is what I need to find out. I've gone for the simplest 'hands off' option I could find, which I know is _not_ the best option, but it's a start. The feeds cannot be customised; members, threads, subjects cannot be excluded so it's a catch-all feed - it can definitely be improved upon and that's the next stage.


----------



## classic33 (23 Jan 2015)

Media is also up on the sites.


----------



## Shaun (26 Jan 2015)

After some helpful advice from members (_thanks_) the Facebook and Twitter automated feeds have been suspended in favour of a more selective manual approach.


----------

