How to Find Your Twitter RSS Feed & Profile ID Number
How to Find Your Twitter RSS Feed
Twitter has announced that it no longer supports or displays your Twitter feed on their site in plain view; however, there are many reasons you might want to continue to use it, say in a WordPress blog text widget that displays your latest Tweets. You can still find your Twitter rss feed by using this url:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/glenwoodfin.rss
Simply substitute your Twitter profile name where my name (glenwoodfin) is.
You can also replace your Twitter Profile ID number as well if you know it.
https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/15793787.rss
Some searchers may have found this post when searching for ‘how to find your Twitter RSS feed url‘ or ‘how to find my Twitter timeline’. These are one in the same.
If you wish to find your Twitter Profile ID number, go to: http://idfromuser.org/ and type in your Twitter account name. Mine is: glenwoodfin.
If the site above is down, which it is from time to time, I suggest you try: http://www.idfromuser.com/ as an alternative to find your Twitter profile id number.
When the sites don’t seem to be working, instead of trying to figure out your numerical id, just use your Twitter profile name instead since it gives you an rss feed with the same content:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/Put-Your-Twitter-Profile-Name-Here.rss . Mine is: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/glenwoodfin.rss . Forget the number id!
If you wish to show your Twitter RSS feed on your website that automatically displays your latest Tweets, there are several ways you can do this. This post is created on WordPress blog software and it comes with a free default plugin/widget that lets you copy and paste your Twitter RSS feed url in it and it will instantly display in the sidebar.
To find this RSS widget, login to your WordPress dashboard and look down the left side to locate the ‘Appearance’ category. When you click on it, you’ll see the ‘Widgets’ tab, click on that and you’ll see the default RSS widget. Drag and drop it into the sidebar area, then insert your Twitter RSS feed url in the form, click save then click publish. You can show any feed in this widget, it doesn’t have to be a Twitter feed. In fact, look down the right side of this page and you’ll see my Tweets displayed in the RSS widget. If you have a static website, you can do a Google search for ‘RSS widget’ and find free ones or reasonably priced ones. Some of the free ones have a link back to the designer’s site, so I’d take that out of the code if you wish to hold more link juice on your page or buy a premium one without a back link to the widget designer’s site.
To find your Facebook feeds, go here.
Does Adding a Twitter Feed to Your Site Increase Page Rank?
You have to be careful when decoding anything a representative from Google says on this subject. Notice Matt Cutts doesn’t talk about the ranking power of always having fresh content on your site or whether there is an added ranking benefit to people staying longer on your site while they are reading your Twitter feed, he only talks about adding a Twitter feed to get links. A sticky site (one that keeps people on your site longer, thus minimizing the bounce rate) can be good for ranking even though it’s only a small factor in the Goolge ranking algorithm.
Matt Cutts only refers to one aspect of ranking, Page Rank, but there are well over 200 ranking factors in the Google algorithm. I say adding a feed is good for ranking all things being equal because it adds new content to your page every time you Tweet.
Google Page Rank is a number assigned to a web page that starts at 0 and goes all the way up to 10. The scale is largely based on the number of other sites that link back to your site and the Page Rank of those sites linking in. To increase one’s Page Rank by one digit, you have to increase the links coming in by 8 times. Each level is exponentially based by a factor of 8. This is an educated guess, but it’s proven to be a good rule of thumb. You can install a Page Rank checker add on to many browsers like Firefox, or simply go to a site like PageRankCheck.net and you’ll be able to find what any page is ranked. Bare in mind that Page Rank is only one of the factors in determining where your site comes up in a search, but it’s a strong indicator.
If you Tweet about a subject relevant to your website, then I think it’s logical to conclude adding a Twitter feed to your site is a good thing. As an online reputation manager, I have to have the edge over all other sites, especially major media like newpapers. I believe it will help in ranking even if the content of your Tweets is unrelated to your site, but it’s even better if your Tweets contain relevant content and keywords that have similar topics.
Please re-Tweet this, Google Plus, and share on Facebook if you’d like me to continue to share content that makes a difference in your SEO and web site traffic. It means the world to me.
45 Responses to “How to Find Your Twitter RSS Feed & Profile ID Number”
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Glen Woodfin’s Tweets-
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I’ve been to 5 sites claiming to tell me what to do, and this is the only explanation that simply has the URL that I need to plug in. THANK YOU for clear information.
Kick grass and take dames.
I’m only interested how the mentioned site guess the twitter ID.
There is no guessing, I listed a link that does the search for your numberical Twitter ID for you. Try it out.
I misunderstood your question. I don’t know what process the http://www.idfromuser.com/ uses to find your Twitter ID number. Great question!
Do you know how to find the rss feed for a search? (like http://twitter.com/#!/search/%40glenwoodfin )
It doesn’t appear in the rss feed logo anymore.
I worked at it for 10 minutes. I have not been able to find a search feed either. When I do, I’ll post. Thanks. Great question!
You might find this interesting: https://dev.twitter.com/.
This is example of Twitter RSS Feed link :
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/TFB_Lovers.rss
Just change TFB_Lovers (TFB_Lovers is my twitter username) with your desire username.
Hope it helps..
Catherine, the post already explained this, beginning in the 4th line.
Now, you owe me a drink.
FYI: Looks like http://www.idfromuser.com isn’t working anymore.
Yes, I’m bummed about it and I don’t know what the story is.
Is there a workaround to find the user id? I’ve been trying to pull ID’s from http://www.idfromuser.com for two days. It pulled one after trying for hours, but no luck since then.
Yes, you can do Google searches for your tweet and figure it out, or just forget about your Twitter numerical id, just use your account name instead of the number. For example, my Twitter id number is: 15793787, but there is no need to know that number, just use your Twitter profile id since it generates the same feed: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/glenwoodfin.rss. There is no need to produce the same feed with your numerical id when you can use the written one. Numerical: https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/15793787.rss. Check it out. They both generate a feed with the same content (Tweets).
The IDfromuser link is working again!
I’m so glad you posted this. I spent a while trying to figure out why my twitter account worked just fine, but my client’s did not. Turns out this was exactly the problem, that my client’s feed was brand new thus it would only work with the newer feed style.
Thanks a ton!
Thanks Ryan.
Thanks! Very helpful article. Love the dog pic!
Hi Gina, looks like you’re out there swinging the bat too.
Oh, my dog says hi.
Thanks! so easy to do. other websites give you lousy and long ways of fulfiling this task.
Thanks again.
Nice info.
Ok, but if I’m not interested un my tweets. If i just want to read my follows timeline, is there a tool or something that i could use to transform my twitter follows stream into RSS?
In other words, instead of using twitter.com I want to use an rss reader to read my twitter. How I do that?
Thanks
Hope this helps you: http://www.techstartups.com/2010/01/14/fix-twitter-for-yourself/.
Excellent tip! Thank you very much!
So has the ability to pull the twitter feed of a user in rss format been disabled? I keep getting “page not found” when i try to open http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/hqdn.rss
Your Twitter rss feed is alive and well my friend. I took a screen shot of it for you: http://www.glenwoodfin.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/HQDN-Twitter-Feed-12-2-2011-12-17-40-AM.jpg .
I found your numerical profile id Twitter feed too, it is: https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/221619129.rss .
So, you are good to go!
Glen, thanks for posting this. I used this convention last night in the #wordpress RSS widget, and it worked beautifully. Much to my dismay, this morning it errored out consistently, although it worked perfectly in Safari. I’m guessing WordPress and Twitter had a tiff last night and slept in separate beds. However, can’t tolerate such caprice, so I defaulted to the legacy solution that’s worked consistently in all of my blogs for years. This isn’t as elegant because it depends on json, etc., but in case anyone else feels like I do ;^) – here’s the code: (cut & paste in a [wordpress text] widget, substituting your handle for 3 instances of [username])::
Follow username on Twitter
Christopher, thank you for your expansion of the subject, however, I didn’t understand what didn’t work for you. The Twitter rss feeds I shared for my Twitter feed are working. Feel free to elaborate in an additional comment.
The link you provided goes to a “suspended” account. If you send me a new link, I will edit your comment to display the new link.
Ty for this quick explanation…have been hearing a lot about RSS feed lately and never paid attention what it actually is, then when I found up you can use it for promoting your website through twitter and pinging, I needed to know where to get that twitter RSS feed. So thx again for the info.
Zeljko, for years I kept hearing about rss and feeds, but I didn’t understand them. Finally, about a year ago, I read everything I could find on rss feeds.
RSS feeds primarily do three things: they notify the search engines that there is new content to index, allow people to subscribe to your content, and finally, one can tap an rss feed to post new content on autopilot on a different site.
From there, one can do many exotic things with rss feeds that involve mashups (combining several rss feeds) and make your xml feeds sing.
By listing your rss feeds in rss directories, you can gain more traffic when associated with your primary keywords in an anchor text link.
I know this post is a few months old now, but a friend of my just passed it along to me because I was telling her that I’ve been trying to find out how in the world you could find Twitter RSS feeds these days. Thanks for the info.
Sylviane, thanks for stopping by and leaving a supportive comment. Good luck with your Persuasive Article Marketing business.
THANK YOU! Wish I found this first – definitely helpful
You’re welcome Les! Glad it helped.
Thanks for the post
I wanted to work on a script to display my timeline but i didn’t know where to find it (the timeline that is)
Twitter officially says they no longer support feeds, but thank goodness we can still find them. There are such great ways to syndicate your Twitter feed.
By “no longer support” does that mean that soon the timeline url won’t be available anymore?
Hi Richard, the official Twitter site used to have information about the Twitter rss feeds, but they have removed it. However, it still exists and can be used for syndication. My guess is they don’t plan to delete the feed, they’re just not telling anyone about it anymore. Hopefully, it will be a permanent feed.
I have no knowlege of Twitter deleting their rss feed timelines. They sure would destoy a million feed widgets if they did. They stopped supporting Twitter feeds about a year ago and yet the savvy can still find them, so I’m guessing they are in no hurry to eliminate them. If they ever do, I’m sure they will come up with a propriety way of displaying them on your site.
I don’t suppose there’s a way to find an RSS link that ignores/omits retweets?
Ginger, there probably is a way to filter out reTweets from a feed. I have to admit that nothing comes to mind, but when you find something, please come back to share it.
@Ginger if you are familiar with php you could probably use that to filter feeds; i’m working on something similar which lead me to this websites.
@glenwoodfin The feed via Twitter profile name isn’t recognized by Google Reader, but the Twitter profile number found by idfromuser.com is. This is a change since I’ve been following Twitter streams in Google Reader for some years. Thanks for your directions.
Thanks for this – need it
I do too.