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If you watched my last HootSuite Tutorial, you should already be pretty well versed in adding social media accounts. But what about those other “smaller” social networks such as Instagram, YouTube, and Tumblr?

In order to manage those accounts with HootSuite, you must use the App directory. If you go to your HootSuite Dashboard, hover over the wrench icon (tools), and then click “App Directory”, you’ll be able to add several third party apps that allow integration into HootSuite.

You can find this feature by clicking on “Settings” (gear icon) in the HootSuite dashboard and selecting “RSS/Atom”. Clicking the plus sign will allow you to enter your feed URL and set the parameters of how RSS feed items get posted to your social networks.

One cool feature of using RSS feeds with HootSuite is that it allows you to prepend your social media updates with text. That means you can automatically have “New Post” or “Update” inserted in front of your article title. You can take the possibilities with this anywhere. Perhaps you have a hashtag associated with your website. With this feature, you will be able to automatically have that hashtag prepended in your post.

Once you click “Save Feed” you will be all ready to go. Next time you post an article on your blog or website, wait a few hours and check your sent messages in HootSuite. You will see that your blog title and a link are automatically sent to the social network that you designated. This means you should be very careful when creating titles for your articles. You want to be concise and favor keywords at the beginning of the article title (you should be doing this for SEO purposes anyway).