WordPress and Twitter

Unless you have been hiding under a rock you will have already or will have plans to enter the twitterverse. If you are using WordPress then there is good news as there are plenty of tools to help you promote your twitter profile, manage your tweets and generally promote your tweetdom in a bid to gain more followers.

In fact if you search the WordPress Plugin archive you will find there are over 200 plugins listed that are Twitter related. It would take you several days to review them all. I know because I have done it, thereby saving you the time and effort.

This article is a round-up of the best of the best Twitter Plugins and Widgets for WordPress. Anyone with a WordPress blog and a Twitter account will want to use at least one of these applications to enhance your Twitter profile on your blog. I have tested all these widgets and know them to work with the current version of WordPress.

Twitter friendly Posts

The plugin creates a shorter link for every blog post, so instead of having:
http://webdesignlessons.com/wordpress/plugins/twitter-friendly-links/ you can use http://webdesignlessons.com/554
This will not replace your original URL’s but will provide you aditional new URL’s that you can use. When you publish a post you will be presented with a new option in the Edit Post page in your WordPress backend. That is “Tweet this Post” This abbreviates your headline and appends your short URL and allows it to post it as a tweet.

Twitter Member Linking

Anytime you’d like to link to a Twitter member’s profile, simply use: @membername anywhere within your post, page, or comment and the link will be generated automatically upon publishing. Likewise, you can do the same thing with Twitter Tags. Just use: #tagname anywhere within the post, page, or comment and the link to Twitter Search will be generated automatically upon publishing. There are many modules for WordPress that do one or more of these things but this was the only one that I found that will do all of the above in one go.

Twitter Friends Widget

http://www.paulmc.org/whatithink/wordpress/plugins/twitter-friends-widget/

Twitter Friends is a WordPress plugin that displays your Twitter followers in your sidebar in the same way that they appear on your Twitter profile. THis helps promote your followers, using the you scratch my back I scratch yours philosophy this is one widget that is sure to increase your Twitter followers. I went to install this widget and was told that it had not been tested on my version of WordPress, well I tested it and can assure you that it does. I have used it on several blogs for clients including http://jkhanok.com and plan on using it on my own.

Twitter Widget Pro
This is a great little widget that gives you greater control of how your site handles Twitter feeds. My latest plugin is a sidebar widget that handles Twitter feeds. It’s true that you could just point an RSS widget at one of the Twitter feeds, but you end up with the whole tweet as a link, @replies don’t function, etc. Twitter Widget Pro properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing, allowing you to display your twitter profile image, and even allowing you to specify a custom error message to display when Twitter is down.

Thread Twitter fetch your tweets and display them in thread style. Author: denishua
http://fairyfish.com/2009/01/19/thread-twitter/

A fairly simple widget which allows you to specify and display a Twitter search (or a Twitter hashtag) in your sidebar. Future developments will hopefully include allowing more than one of these widgets to be used at once, with different searches in them.

Simple Twitter Link
http://www.artiss.co.uk/simple-twitter-link
A great widget that I wil be implmenting on several blogs of my own and for clients. This widget allows you to let your sites visitors to “Tweet the Page”. It will create a link that your users can click whch will take them to their tweet login/post page with a prefilled tweet stating that they are reading your article and get this passes a TinyURL snippet into the tweet to boot.

Start raising your Twitter profile today by incorporating one of these tools.

No related posts.