I’ve had an account on Merchant Circle for Legacy Marketing for awhile but other than filling out my company details, I haven’t focused much on promoting it.  However I got a very nice review from a client, wanted to show it off, and I started to research the ways to integrate the Merchant Circle accounts with other web 2.0 sites.

Although there is a “Facebook Connect” option for Merchant Circle, it appears that it is just for personal profiles.  Either that or it didn’t sync with my Merchant Circle account because my Merchant Circle business account is tied to a business email address and my Facebook account is tied to my personal email address.

Since I want the Merchant Circle reviews and coupons to post to my Legacy Marketing business fan page and not my personal account wall, I scrapped that option.

I started to look for an alternate Merchant Circle application, when the light bulb went off . . .

RSS!

Sure enough, my MC business page had it’s own RSS feed.  From there, it was a snap. (Are you wondering what is RSS?  Read this article on what RSS is and how to use it.)

Adding Merchant Circle Reviews to Facebook

I’ve used several different Facebook applications to post RSS feeds to my wall and/or fan page such as Networked Blogs and Blog RSS Feed Reader; however, they can be a little tricky to configure to post only to your fan page wall or to both your personal and fan page wall.  I found a newer application called RSS Graffiti that has a much easier interface to have granular control over your RSS feed’s postings.

After installing the RSS Grafitti application, you can set whether you want to give the application permission to your personal page and fan pages on an individual basis.  Multiple feeds can be added and you can add prefixes or unique titles to the feed postings.  You can also track the url clicks through your bit.ly account, which I think is a really cool feature.

As I already had the application installed on my fan page, it took a total of 3 minutes add the review feed.

Adding Merchant Circle Reviews to Twitter

Twitter integration is becoming de rigueur for social networking sites and I’m a little surprised that it isn’t a default feature for a Merchant Account business profile.  Even so, there are other tools that make it easy to add to Twitter using the RSS feed.

There are several services out there which will post an RSS feed to twitter; however, my favorite is Twitterfeed.  Every new review or post on your RSS feed can be displayed on your Twitter account within minutes with just a few simple steps.

1. Sign up for an account at Twitterfeed
2. Click “create a new feed.”
3. Name the RSS feed and enter your feed url, click test.
4. Click “Continue to Step 2.”
5. Click “Twitter” under the services option.
6. Click “Authenticate Twitter Account.”
7. After you have allowed Twitterfeed to access your Twitter account, the integration is complete.

Now every time a customer posts a review or you post a coupon or a blog, it will be displayed on your Facebook and Twitter accounts.  The caveat to this method is that you must be committed to excellent customer service.  If you repeatedly get customer complaints and have unhappy customers, you may want to think twice before setting this up.

If you’re thinking, “That sounds great, but all this tech stuff makes my eyes cross,” don’t worry!  That’s what we’re here for.  Contact us regarding our social media promotion options.

If after reading this you are inspired to take your site or business promotion to new heights with RSS, Sean Donahoe (an RSS marketing fiend) just came out with a online seminar called “RSS Master Class.”  It is a limited offering and I haven’t checked the availability lately, but if it is still open, I would jump on it.