As you can see above, some feeds have some really cool flares (links) showing in the footer: Link to a Facebook Page, Website, Twitter profile… In the Feedburner’s feedflare library, you have a wide choice of flares for your feed, but not a single one helps you promote your social profiles.
To compensate this shortcoming, Feedburner lets you create and submit your own duct-taped feedflare. So how can you create a feedflare that promotes your Twitter profile?
In Feedburner > Optimize > Feedflare, you see the list of Feedburner’s official flares, and a box where you can submit the url of your home-made Feedflare. Creating your own feedflare is totally cool with Feedburner, developers are encouraged to create their own. Before going any further, open Notepad or any similar plain text editor, and paste this text:
<FeedFlareUnit>
−
<Catalog>
<Title>Follow HyveUp on Twitter</Title>
<Description>Feedflare inviting readers to follow on Twitter
</Description>
</Catalog>
−
<FeedFlare>
<Text>Follow HyveUp on Twitter</Text>
<Link href=”http://www.twitter.com/hyveup”/>
</FeedFlare>
</FeedFlareUnit>
Now just replace my info with your own, and save. When saving, in the name of your document, change .txt by .xml.
Now you need to host your xml document somewhere online. Personally, I use my Amazon s3 account for everything I host online (10 cents a month is a deal-maker). However, if you do not have an account there, I don’t recommend creating one just for a feedflare. Instead try Stashbox: It’s a free hosting Website, and while I haven’t tried hosting a feedflare on Stashbox, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.
Once you have uploaded your .xml document there, grab the public url of the document, and submit it to Feedburner where you can paste your own feedflares’ urls:
And you are now promoting your Twitter profile through Feedburner. How cool is that?!
Side note: You can auto-publish blog posts as notes on Facebook by submitting your blog’s RSS feed. Feedburner’s feedflares do appear inside Facebook’s notes.