Ways To Integrate Twitter Into Your Blog
Feb. 4th, 2009 by Thomas McMahon
Twitter seems to be taking over the web. Everyone seems to have a Twitter account, or two, even President Obama.
With all the fanfare surrounding Twitter, there are many ways to integrate Twitter even more into your blog. Here are a few tools get you started.
Tweet This - Tweet This is simply a link integrated into your blog posts that make it easy for users to click on and post your post to Twitter. Think of it like a social bookmark icon, only for updating Twitter instead. You may already even have this integration via a ShareThis or AddThis button. It’s quick and simple and every blog should have this.
TwitterFeed - TwitterFeed can take your blogs feed and automatically post an update to your Twitter account when you make a new blog post. This is handy when keeping your Twitter followers up-to-date on your blog.
Twittar - Twittar matches up your commenter with their Twitter account and pulls their Twitter icon into your comments. This is much like the Gravatar service, only specific to just Twitter. Personally, I think it’d be much better if Twitter integrated with Gravatar.
Twitter Sidebar Widgets - There is no shortage of ways to integrate your Twitter status into your blogs sidebar. From simply pulling the feed and using the RSS widget already integrated into WordPress to custom Ajax widgets that create a full Twitter client in your sidebar.
Here are just a few sidebar Widget ideas:
TweetBacks - TweetBacks integrate Twitter updates about a certain blog post much like trackbacks or pingbacks. This allows a blog author to easily see if other Twitter users are talking about their posts.
TweetSuite - TweetSuite takes TweekBacks a step farther and includes a Digg like button to show the number of Tweets the post has gotten, a most Tweeted widget and many more Twitter integration options.
Tweet Digest - This plugin will pull a daily digest of your Twitter updates and post them to your blog as a blog post. That way, if some of your blog readers aren’t on Twitter, they can still see your status updates. You can also setup the plugin to make a post each time you make an update to Twitter. This may be a few too many blog updates though if you Twitter often.
Post to Twitter - This plugin will allow you to have a Twitter update box integrated into WordPress’ admin. This would be handy for anyone who spends all day blogging and wants to make quick Twitter updates without leaving WordPress.
Twitip ID - Twitip ID adds another field to the comments area along with name, email and URL for the commentator’s Twitter user name. This allows you and your readers to quickly see who has Twitter accounts and follow them.
Everyday there seems to be more and more Twitter applications and blog plugins created. What have you seen or have you used to integrate Twitter into your blog?
About The Author
Thomas McMahon is a SEO Designer for TopRank Online Marketing in Minneapolis, MN. His specialities inlude technical optimization of existing web sites, creating search engine friendly web designs, and blog optimization. He has also created a number of blog marketing tools, WordPress plug-ins and FireFox add-ons. Blog: http://bloggerdesign.comPosted in: The Net |
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February 6th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
I can’t believe how many services are available for twitter!
I guess I have missed how good it is for bussiness.
I am going to try them all.
Fra
February 6th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
[...] Low is totally into social media and social networking. He’s discovered a number of ways to integrate Twitter into your blog. You can help your readers “tweet” your blog posts, share your Twitter updates in the [...]
February 15th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Your site does not correctly work in safari browser
March 2nd, 2009 at 5:26 am
Yes even personalities also want to twitt, so twitter integration become more important for blogs thank you for given way to integrate otherwise i never know about integration plenty of twitter integration way available.
March 5th, 2009 at 6:29 am
@ fuel It did work on my safari browser. I have found twitter really useful and most of my visitors use it to communicate with me efficiently rather than using email.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:51 am
How does using twitter compare to using rss feeds for your website updates? Which do you think makes them come back more?
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:25 am
Have any of you been noticing a lot of people are getting banned from Twitter recently for using auotmated tools, kind of scary to think they will do this to you.
I think it’s automated follow and unfollow tools that are causing the problems.
just to let you all know.
December 28th, 2009 at 2:34 am
Using twitter with auto scripts is not the way to go, people should keep it more human just like on facebook where I have not seen any auto wall status updates and commenting that can be worthwhile. To me that is equivalent of spamming.
February 6th, 2010 at 6:32 am
Most of these use javascript which is not indexed by SE’s, is there one that runs on the server side and html on the front end.
February 9th, 2010 at 11:36 am
I agree with Jim, if it works in html it can be good for SE.
June 20th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
There are a lot of 3rd party applications for Twitter. Some make it much easier to automate tasks of publishing new Tweets. However, from the standpoint of tracking traffic from Twitter, 3rd party applications make it hard to get accurate traffic stats of Twitter traffic.