Chances are you have seen an RSS feed icon in your life. You’ve noticed that fun orange button (most of the time), but you’ve never clicked on it. You have always wondered what its use was. Maybe you know what an RSS feed is and use it to keep up with the blogs you like. However, if you are a marketer, it is imperative that you realize that RSS feeds are extremely versatile and are capable of much more than consolidating your favorite blog posts for easier reading.

Stay updated – By subscribing to blogs that belong to your industry, you stay up to date on the hottest topics. It’s a good idea to subscribe to blogs within your industry, blogs about marketing, and blogs from your competitors. This will ensure that you are capturing the latest buzz in your niche and learn about current marketing trends to get your company/business out there in the public so they can hear the latest news too!

Great idea – If you’re a blogger, RSS feeds can give you some great insights when you have a case of writer’s block. Scroll through your RSS feed to get ideas from others. Found a topic that is “hot” right now? Did anyone have a different “take” on the latest trend? Do you disagree with someone’s position? These are all great ideas and can cure writer’s block fast.

Twitter Follow – That’s right, you can use an RSS feed to monitor Twitter for mentions of industry terms you think are important, names of competitors, and your own company. Just replace the bold parts of the URLs below with your own relevant information and add them to your RSS reader!

Tag search: “http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23hashtag”

User mention search: “http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%40Username”

Keyword search: “http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=keyword”

subscribe to youtube – As with Twitter, you can use an RSS feed to subscribe to YouTube users’ video channels. Just change the bold parts of the URLs below with the username of the YouTube user.

“http://www.youtube.com/username/”Username?feature=mhee

Establish authority on LinkedIn – RSS is extremely beneficial for social needs! It can even help you with LinkedIn. By answering questions on LinkedIn, you not only demonstrate that you are an authority on certain topics within the LinkedIn community, but you also gain backlinks to your website and can even generate leads. To maximize this potential, simply search for the categories that are relevant to your niche and click the RSS subscription button that says “Subscribe to new questions on [category]”.

Google tracking– Did you know that you can stay up to date when Google searches on certain keywords that pique your interest? Simply do a Google search for any keyword phrase that is relevant to your business and then select ‘News’ or ‘Blogs’ to filter the results by these categories (it should be on the right hand side or at the top of the search engine). search). results page). Then scroll down and click the RSS feed icon to get updates whenever a new blog or news article is written that matches the search criteria you’ve set.