HootSuite's Syndicator May Be a Google Reader Upgrade for Content Marketers

Where to turn in a post-Google Reader world? HootSuite may hold the answer.

Since Google Reader announced its abdication of the RSS throne, content marketers have been gnashing their teeth and casting about wildly for a lifeline. Feedly is a competent and popular replacement that’s been getting a lot of attention, for the most legitimate of reasons. But when change is forced upon us, mightn’t that be the right time to level up?

Syndicator is HootSuite’s brand new RSS reader service, and it’s different but appears to be awesome. Instead of simple RSS reading, this tool brings content from all your selected feeds directly to your HootSuite interface. That makes it super-easy to turn around and push exactly what you want to through your own channels as content you share.

Anything that saves time in content marketing and social media management sounds good to us, and since such a lot of firm owners are already using HootSuite to schedule content anyway, this could be a real winner. After all, if you’re in the dashboard you might as well scan, schedule, stream…lunch!

HootSuite is clearly shooting to take advantage of the temporary crisis caused by Google Reader’s death, and they’ve put a lot of thought into how to do its job and more at the same time. The company describes the Syndicator this way:

In addition to filling a void left by Google Reader, allowing you to manage and organize all of your RSS content from streams in the HootSuite dash, the HootSuite Syndicator conveniently fits into your social content curation and distribution work flow. This means you can now do many of the things you could do with Google Reader from within HootSuite, such as organizing feeds into groups, marking items as favorites or selecting those you’d like to view later.

But even better, it’s easy to quickly share items to your social networks in HootSuite; the app will even remember which items you’ve shared! The HootSuite Syndicator can:

• Manage RSS feeds with the Subscription Manager
• Customize streams by setting up groups and filters
• Mark items as read or unread, favorite items and save items to view later
• View articles and stories within the HootSuite dash
• Share items to your social networks in HootSuite, even track the stories you’ve shared
• Install the Hootlet Chrome extension to add RSS feeds directly to HootSuite while browsing the web: http://ow.ly/ms34S

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