Adding a Youtube RSS feed into your Facebook page is a simple and effective way to introduce rich media content into your wall updates without having to manually trawl the internet and post these individually.
I’ve had a few people report to me that they’ve had some difficulties in getting the official Youtube method working (http://www.youtube.com/rssls), so I thought I’d make a post to provide some clarification on this with some tried and proven techniques. I’ll be covering methods to include both a Youtube Search Result, as well as how to access a Youtube channel‘s RSS feed – using a celebrity niche as my example.
Youtube Channel RSS Feed
The following is based on the below Google code documentation:
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#User_Uploaded_Videos
The basic URL construct for a user feed uses the following format;
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/USERNAME/uploads
Applying this to (for example) Celine Dion’s personal youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/CelineDionTV), we would then get;
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/CelineDionTV/uploads
This new URL, you should be able to view in a browser to see a standard RSS feed layout similar to;
Youtube Search Results RSS Feed
The following is based on the below Google code documentation:
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#Searching_for_Videos
The basic URL construct for a user feed uses the following format;
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=SEARCH+QUERY&orderby=published&start-index=11&max-results=10&v=2
Applying this again to a search on “Celine Dion”, we’d get the following;
Search result feeds can be a little bit hit and miss (as evidenced by the RSS output of the above feed), so our recommendation would be to try and find an official channel to base your feed from – however either way you now at least have the tools to get it this going!
Importing your Youtube RSS Feeds
Even though these URL constructs will generate valid RSS feeds, we’ve still had instances where on importing these Facebook reports back that it was unable to find the feed. If you encounter this, simple retry to import this again as on the 2nd or 3rd attempt will usually be successful.
