In a nutshell
- RSS feeds provide a centralized way to receive updates from various online sources, helping content creators and consumers stay informed and engaged with relevant topics and trends without having to visit multiple sites.
- Content creators can use RSS feeds to streamline their research process, ensuring they are up-to-date with industry news, pop culture and social media trends.
- Utilizing RSS feeds to distribute content across multiple platforms can significantly expand a creator’s reach and audience engagement.
One of the main goals every aspiring creator should have, especially on YouTube, is building a loyal audience. Regardless of the platform you’ve decided to explore, you should strive to find new ways to engage your target audience. Fortunately, there’s an underrated tool that can help with this: Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds.
Understanding RSS feeds
RSS is a web feed that helps you to get updates from your favorite websites or online sources in one location. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, platforms send you notifications every time new content is published. They include headlines, summaries and links to the most recent articles, blog posts, videos or any content updates from various sources of your choosing. This means you can see all your relevant content in one place without having to actually visit the site where it originated.
Feedly and NewsBlur are popular RSS news aggregators where you can subscribe to the feeds of your favorite places on the web. This can include specific channels on YouTube or your favorite subreddit. They are made for individuals who want personalized content delivery without relying on social media algorithms or email newsletters. We all follow many channels/profiles, so it can be hard to keep track of the most important ones.
Examples of RSS feeds
RSS technology is utilized in many platforms that we interact with daily. For instance, some forums use RSS or a similar system to collect news articles on specific topics for users to read and discuss. Additionally, podcast hosting platforms use RSS feeds to share the content uploaded by users on various platforms, like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The RSS feed contains important details and data about the episodes, making them accessible to a wide audience in podcast directories.
Moreover, RSS readers let you categorize and prioritize your RSS feeds. For example, you can have a work feed that only presents posts from business blogs or news related to work. Then, you can create an entertainment feed that gathers fun articles, podcast episodes or news from your favorite platforms. This setup helps users focus on one topic at a time, allowing them to stay concentrated on what matters most in each feed.
RSS feeds: The benefit for content creators
Doing your research
Being aware of the latest pop culture and social media trends is crucial to keep a growing audience engaged. RSS feeds offer a powerful tool in this effort, cutting down research time by gathering all your source platforms into one single feed.
Additionally, creators should subscribe to RSS feeds of industry-specific blogs, entertainment news outlets, influential social media accounts and trend-spotting websites. This strategy helps them stay on top of what’s popular, including viral memes, breaking news and niche discussions. By being proactive, they can understand what draws in their target audience and fine-tune their content to match.
Using RSS feeds to keep up with pop culture and social media trends also helps creators find timely content-creation opportunities. Whether it’s reacting to viral clips or offering insights on the latest stories in the creator community, creators can position themselves as a leading voice within their niche.
Using RSS to expand the reach of your content
RSS has always been a big help to creators in reaching their audience, even if they don’t realize it. However, how much it actually helps can greatly depend on where you share your content — and where you don’t share it.
Spreading your content across many different platforms increases its reach because it’s more likely to show up in various RSS feeds online. More importantly, using multiple platforms can help new people discover your content through an RSS feed on a platform they haven’t seen you on before.
When creators post their work on various platforms, like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, this increases their content’s reach and, in turn, boosts its engagement levels. Each platform’s RSS feed collects and shares the content from the accounts or pages that users follow, making it more likely for a creator’s work to appear in the feeds of a diverse audience.
Moreover, the way these platforms are linked encourages people to share and promote across different channels. When users find content they like, they might share it on their favorite networks, helping to spread the creator’s work to even more RSS feeds. This natural way of sharing helps introduce the creator’s content to potential new followers.
RSS feeds lead to audience development
Even though RSS feeds might remind us of the early internet days, their value in building an audience is still present today. For content creators, using RSS feeds as part of your strategy can improve how you connect with people, keep them interested and grow your following. By offering a personalized way to deliver content, RSS feeds help creators build their communities and keep them consistently engaged with their content.