The Basics of a Social Media Tool: RSS

Have you been searching around the web, and wondered what that square orange icon with the white arcs is?

Introduction

That small orange icon (and what it represents) can generate enormous amounts of additional traffic for your website.

It represents a link to an RSS feed or Really Simple Syndication, a social media tool.

RSS is a popular way for you to allow your users to browse your site’s most recent postings in a very quick, very convenient manner. Anything that can make your users’ site experience more convenient can easily translate into additional traffic, as the average web user is impatient.

RSS is made up of two major components: the “feed” and a “reader.”

RSS Feed

The feed is a simple web-based page that, when created, will display the headlines of your site’s most recent posts, a brief excerpt of each post, and a link to the original posting.

The feed uses a scripting language similar to HTML, but if you don’t feel comfortable working with code, then there are many programs, websites, and widgets that offer to create your RSS feed without you having to write any code.

Popular blog sites like Blogger and WordPress can automatically create your feed for you.

Feed Reader

Once your site has created an RSS feed, then users can “subscribe” to your feed using an RSS “reader”.

Popular RSS readers, such as Google Reader, allow the user to collect many RSS feeds in one place, so that they can conveniently look at all of the headlines from their favorite sites without having to search each site individually.

If the user sees a headline that interests them, they can click on the link and read the posting right there. In addition to stand-alone RSS readers, certain internet browsers, such as Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari also include the ability to read RSS feeds in-browser, though stand-alone readers contain many more features and controls than the browsers.

RSS for your business

RSS allows your website to keep your company’s news and postings in front of your users.

People who subscribe to RSS feeds often subscribe to many feeds at the same time.  To take advantage of this social media tool to its fullest, your site’s content needs to be engaging and top-notch.

Like any other social media tool, your company should also strive to update frequently, at least a couple of times a week.

RSS can keep your company in the forefront of people’s thinking, which can greatly contribute to increased site traffic and sales.