Twitterfeed, the popular tool for publishing links automatically to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, has been acquired by URL shortener Bitly. Both are loosely associated projects of seed investor and web tech incubator Betaworks, part of what Betaworks CEO John Borthwick calls a “glorious connected ecosystem of things we have going on here.”

For Twitterfeed to move in-house with the analytics provider that is the basis of so much of its value makes sense. Twitterfeed itself has steadily added features in recent months though, from geocoding published messages to publishing into LinkedIn. Is it a good idea to automate publishing of links into social networks? The jury is still out on that one.
Yesterday we wrote about a new WordPress.com feature that enables automated publishing to Facebook Pages and questioned whether this was a good idea. ReadWriteWeb’s own experience has been that posting manually leads to twice as much traffic and more than twice as much engagement.
Asked about this question, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick told us: “There isn’t one answer to fit all here — most publishers/users mix auto posting with manual posting. The right answer is to pick the approach that makes most sense for you – Twitterfeed picks up thousands of users each week who find that it works great for them.”
That makes sense to me and I do love a good bot, myself. Apparently other people do too. Marketing blogger Andrew Hanelly published the results of an experiment today wherein he was able to create a fully automated Twitter account using Twitterfeed that ended up with a Klout score of 43!
Twitterfeed founder Mario Menti (@Mario) has been on Twitter since December, 2006, making him one of the first 50,000 people to create an account.