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Setting up your content feeds

How to connect RSS feeds and sitemaps to Echobox, and keep them working correctly

Echobox uses RSS feeds and sitemaps to discover the content you publish. Connecting at least one feed is required before Echobox can begin recommending and scheduling posts on your behalf.

This article covers how to connect a feed, the difference between RSS feeds and sitemaps, and how to troubleshoot common issues. If you want to include video content in your feed, see Adding video to your content feeds.

Connecting a feed

Every social page connected to Echobox needs at least one RSS feed or sitemap associated with it.

To add a new feed:

  1. Go to Settings → Content Feeds and add your feed URL.
  2. Then go to Settings → Pages and assign that feed to the social pages you want it to supply content for.

Both steps are required. Adding a feed in Content Feeds does not automatically assign it to your pages.

You can connect different feeds to different pages — useful if you publish to multiple audiences and want to control which content is considered for each.

Once connected, Echobox reads your feed approximately every 60 seconds. Content that appears in the feed is brought into your account and stays there even if it later drops off the feed.

RSS feeds vs. sitemaps

Echobox supports both. For most customers, RSS feeds are the better choice.

RSS feeds typically contain your most recent 10–20 articles. Because they're built to surface new content quickly, they update reliably and carry the full range of metadata Echobox can use.

Sitemaps often contain thousands of articles, but Echobox reads only the first 3,000. Only articles added to the sitemap after it's been connected to Echobox will appear in your Home Feed. Sitemaps commonly omit title, image, and publication date fields, which limits how much Echobox can work with. They also cannot include a description field.

If you're currently using a sitemap and not experiencing issues, there's no urgent reason to switch. But if you have the option, an RSS feed will give Echobox more to work with.

What Echobox reads from your feed

For each article item, Echobox reads:

  • Title
  • Description
  • Image
  • Publication date

These fields are used to prepopulate post content and inform Echobox's recommendations. Because RSS tags don't always update automatically after an article is published, we recommend using OG tags where possible — social platforms use these when rendering shared links, and keeping them current ensures your posts look right.

Validating your feed

Before connecting a feed, you can check that it's correctly formatted using the W3C feed validator: https://validator.w3.org/feed/

If your feed doesn't validate, the issue will need to be fixed at the source before Echobox can read it reliably. Echobox cannot connect to or correct an invalid feed.

Can my feed include video content?

Yes. If your feed includes video items, Echobox can ingest and surface them automatically alongside your articles. This requires some technical setup at the feed level. See Adding video to your content feed.

 

Troubleshooting

My feed won't connect or can't be added.

Open the feed URL in a browser. If it throws an error, or if no items are visible, Echobox will not be able to read it. Check that the URL is correct and publicly accessible. If the feed loads but articles are showing 404 errors when opened, that is an issue with the article URLs themselves, not the feed.

Videos or articles aren't appearing in my Home Feed.

Check the following:

  • Confirm the feed URL uses HTTPS, not HTTP. Some feeds redirect silently — paste the URL into a browser and check what appears in the address bar.
  • Confirm the feed is assigned to the relevant social page in Settings → Pages, not just added in Content Feeds.
  • Confirm that items in the feed include valid publication dates. If no pubDate is present, Echobox may not surface them correctly.

New articles are taking a long time to appear.

Echobox reads feeds approximately every 60 seconds, so new articles should appear quickly after being added to the feed. If there's a consistent delay, the most likely cause is feed caching — your feed may be set to cache for a long period before refreshing. Check the caching policy configured for your feed and reduce the maximum cache age if possible.

My posts contain HTML code in the title or description.

This usually means your feed contains double-encoded HTML entities — for example, & instead of &. The cleanest fix is to strip all HTML entities from the relevant fields in your feed and use plain text only.

I have a large number of feeds connected. Will this affect performance?

For most customers, the number of connected feeds has no impact on performance. If you have more than approximately 150 active feeds per property, you may start to see delays in new content appearing. Contact support if you believe this is affecting you.

Need help with something not covered here? Contact the Echobox support team.