RSS Feed Reader for Businesses. Simply Explained

What is RSS?

RSS, in itself, is one of the earliest forms of automation that’s been at the start of the Internet. If it wasn’t for Really Simple Syndication, you wouldn’t have the Internet as we know and love today. Subscribing to YouTube channels, following newsletters, following on Twitter? RSS laid the groundwork for all of that.

RSS has been the original tool for curation. Users subscribe to all their favorite websites via their RSS feed reader and then receive all their content in the handy dashboard. It’s simple, streamlined, and fully automated. Whenever a blog publishes a new article, its RSS feed updates itself, which then the RSS feed reader reads and pulls up the new post. Users are able to view new updates in chronological order.

Is it useful for businesses?

RSS feed readers are fit for business purposes. There are several reasons why RSS readers make a fine business and productivity tool:

·       RSS has greatly expanded from its origin. RSS readers have expanded the type of feeds they allow users to subscribe to. In addition to text-based sites, you can use RSS readers to subscribe to Twitter feeds and searches, public Facebook pages and Instagram accounts, podcasts, YouTube channels and Google Alerts. You can cast your net as wide as it needs to be to get the results you want.

·       RSS feed readers are efficient and feature-packed. You will notice that market leaders like Inoreader even have a business plan, which is completely negotiable.

·       RSS feed readers can be fully integrated with so many other applications via Zapier and IFTTT.

How Can Businesses Benefit from it?

Follow the trends

Where RSS feed readers show their true worth is in research. They’re built to process, organize and display large quantities of content across a variety of feed types. Inoreader shines bright in this regard thanks to its host of features – filters, rules, article annotations and tagging, and the support for every platform from Twitter and YouTube to Reddit and Telegram. That’s on top of news sites, trade publications, and newsletters.

It’s important to know what’s happening in your industry and what trends are going to be defined. This doesn’t only apply to seeing what product feature is most desirable but also learning about the language your audience uses. What are the search terms that matter most right now? Perhaps the biggest trend in search is native language search. Rigid keywords are no longer as relevant as before so it’s about how your audience expresses themselves.

Search for new ideas

While you’re at it, keep your eyes out for fresh new ideas for content. Social media continues to dominate how products are sold with TikTok leading the influencer market. What are ways for you to break into that market within your industry? Do you have an idea for a TikTok account? What would it look like? What would you post?

Staying current with what’s captivating customers right now allows you to generate competitive content yourself.

Get to know their audience

As a business, your main objective is to units off shelves, improve booking rates and generate buzz among your core customer audience. That’s impossible without a deep understanding of what your customer wants and needs. You have to know what about your product ticks off boxes for your audience and what leads to the sound of crickets.

RSS feed readers can be fine-tuned to follow customer conversations about your products, their beliefs and their needs. You won’t get many unfiltered opinions in your mentions unless you really do something wrong, so having your ear to the ground in that way is truly essential.

The way to do this is to monitor non-branded, but industry and customer specific keywords and phrases on top of directing your attention to digital spaces they might inhabit be it Reddit, TikTok or Twitter. Once you spot conversations that matter to you, you have an opportunity to even reach out proactively.

Know what competitors are doing

RSS feed readers are well suited to follow your competitors closely. Apart from keeping an eye on their official accounts and website, you can monitor competitor keywords such as their brand name, product names, branded hashtags or recognizable phrases. This way you don’t only follow what they share, but what other conversations happen at the same time.

Competitors are a stellar resource for how to plan your next moves. Maybe your competitors are in the planning stages to launch a new product. What are the specifics? When will it happen? How are they marketing and reaching out to their audience? After all, you both share a core audience and their response will give you valuable insights into what could potentially work in your favor. At the very least you’ll know when to avoid making any major moves yourself. Unless you want to create direct competition for the attention of your audience. A risky move altogether.

But that’s only one application. RSS can tell you about public image, negative and positive product reviews, customer pain points, and overall performance of their marketing campaigns.

The whole team can use it

RSS feed readers have made the jump into being full-on productivity tools by enabling teams to use their readers to coordinate on future projects. Connectivity is one of the biggest trends right now most visible thanks to the integrations between different applications and services made very possible by platforms like IFTTT and Zapier

Now RSS feed readers can create private spaces for users to share articles between each other. The whole reason for their creation is to assist with collaborative research. Whether you’re working towards a shared project or performing data gathering for a report, these private boards (as they’re often called) are perfect for sharing and directly commenting on the article itself. This allows you to have conversations with your teammates without drowning the articles under lines of chat as it would happen in Slack or Discord. Plus, you have additional tools like the ability to tag and add annotations to further help you with your work.

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