How to Twitterize your Wordpress Blog
The past week has seen a veritable explosion in activity around ways to work Twitter into your blog, largely inspired by this post over on Mashable. Given the very impressive growth rate (422% YOY as of August 2008), and the seemingly unlimited utility of handy, addicting 140-character thoughts and ramblings, it looks like that while Twitter will increasingly supplant blogging for many, there are huge opportunities for the two forms of communication to compliment each other.
As I started exploring some of the ways I could “Twitterize” my Wordpress blog, I built quite a list in a very short time. What’s most impressive is how many of these plugins, widgets, and ideas have sprung up since the New Year – the Twitter world moves fast it seems. I bookmarked as many as possible and shared them below in semi-braindump style. For the closest thing to a “definitive list”, try the WP codex.
FYI, HowtoMakeMyBlog.com has a nice head start on this, so credit where it’s due and consider this is my expansion on the idea.
Showcase Your Tweets
Display your latest Tweets. From the simple Twitter badge (and you can pull the code out to display, say, in your blog header if you like), SimpleTwitter, and Twitter for Wordpress, to Alex King’s now-veteran Twitter Tools suite, you have MANY options. Enjoy!
Forget blogrolls, try tweetrolls! There’s a Tweetroll copy/paste badge code from Owen Cutajar, and the very cool TweepRoll Deluxe plugin from George Maicovschi. George’s, along with his TweetStats plugin and the TweepRoll + Followers plugin, basically allow you to display a complete Twitter status bar in your blog sidebar.
If you’re doing that, why not just go all in and make your whole blog look like Twitter with George’s WPTwitter theme?
Latest Tweets/Favorites: Lots of options here, including the Tweet-Stats plugin and widgets from Improving the Web, which look very promising.
Embed @twittername links directly in your posts: A new one from Joost, Twitter Link plugin means anytime you put an @username into a blog post, it converts it to a Twitter link.
Work Tweets into Your Comments & Pings
In what seems to be the newest, and IMO most exciting, trend in WP/Twitter integration is via that chunk of space after each posts where we love to interact – the comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks section. Some plugins:
Enable commenters to show off their Twitter ID with the WP-Twittip ID Plugin from FiddyP. (Bonus for Thesis Users, how to integrate this using Hooks). This is a reasonably simple way to help your commenters show off their Twitter ID and, hopefully, get some well deserved follows for leaving a great comment.
Tweetbacks, the new Trackback! The basic idea is to capitalize on the fact that as Twitter grows, more of more of the link sharing that used to happen on blogs (resulting in pingbacks or trackbacks) is now happening on Twitter. The result is the tweetback. There seem to be a couple plugins available, one using Javascript (Dan Zarella’s Tweetbacks) and one drops the tweetbacks into your WP database (Smashing Magazine’s/Joost de Valk’s Tweetbacks), so pick your poison. One “bug” I’ve found is that when installing Dan’s plugin, an “upgrade” shows up on my WP 2.7 plugin admin page – when selecting it, it upgrades me to Joost’s plugin, which is, far as I can tell, an entirely separate release. (Bonus for Thesis Users, how to install Dan’s plugin. No clue how to install Joost’s in Thesis via Hooks just yet.)
UPDATES: 1) Dan has bundled up all his Twitter plugins into one “sweet” little one, TweetSuite. 2) Latest word via Twitter from Joost is that the next version will tackle spam (YES!) and BONUS FOR THESIS USERS he’s talking with Chris Pearson about getting some kind of integration done.
Who needs Gravatars when you can have Twitter Avatars?! Or technically, you have Gravatars if your commenter doesn’t specify a Twitter ID when using the Twittar plugin from Smashing Magazine.
Spreading the Love of the Tweeples
In the spirit of ShareThis, Sociable, and other social linking plugins, now we have TwitThis. It embeds a simple graphic or text link at the bottom of each of your posts, so people can quickly Tweet your permalink (that sounds kind of…odd, doesn’t it?). The only downside here for me is it require your readers to type their username/password on the 3rd-party TwitThis web site. Given the recent spat of Twitter phishing attacks, this could be a real barrier. Still, great idea.
Dan Zarella’s TweetSuite (linked above) also gives you the option of inserting a Tweet This-type botton at the top of your post. Worth checking out.
Bonus for Blogger users, Mack Collier has some sample code up showing how to add a similar link to each of your posts.
Tweet Directly from Your Blog
Alex King’s Twitter Tools, linked above, enable you to Tweet directly from either your blog sidebar, or the dashboard page of your Wordpress install. I tried this one out on a self-hosted WP 2.7 install and it works fine. Twitter Tools also let’s you auto-Tweet every post (I do NOT recommend this, unless you post very infrequently and Tweet a lot), or post daily or weekly summaries of your Tweets within your blog feed.
Probably tons more I missed. If you know of any worth checking out, please let me know in the comments or @kevinbriody!
7 Comments
great twitter apps list! I am pretty sure that they’ll all get integrated somehow by wordpress on their next major update.
(if you go to your wp-twitip-id settings page and use the value of “text_input” as the class for the field then it will look the same as the other fields)
This is like the condensed soup version of Twitter for Wordpress bloggers!
I see value in using more Twitter plugins, especially versions that don’t require passwords thanks to the latest round of phishing scams.
Nice customization of your Thesis theme, I like how the inside red border matches your header image.
Thanks for the great list! I’m sure I’ll be using some of these.
I also like http://twitterfeed.com, which allows you to Tweet RSS feeds (ie blog posts). You can choose how often it posts your feeds. It’s a great way to quickly alert your readers that there is a new post up, and I’ve gotten several new readers because of it.
@ Andy – thanks on the formatting tip. Trying it out shortly. I would love to see the official WP builds start to incorporate more Twitter (or in general, microblogging) support. We’ll see.
@ Joe – thanks on the theme comment. I’m still learning how to use Thesis given it’s so different than a base WP theme, but at a minimum I can play with colors. :)
@ Elizabeth – I hadn’t see Twitterfeed before, thanks for the heads up.
Taking the Social Media plunge, trying out the Tweets and the FaceBook and the Blogs. Seems alot of folks have their fav. Seems more effective to manage each to most effectively reach out to different publics. Lots to learn…
Great list of plugins! I am looking forward to the next version of WordPress and next version of Thesis as I believe both will do a lot to integrate Twitter into their products.
Thanks for mentioning my Twitter article in there.
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