Tools to hook up Twitter and WordPress - there are dozens of them, from tools to broadcast your blog posts to your Twitter followers, to - ah - tools to allow your blog readers to broadcast your blog posts to *their* Twitter followers. Here are a few of my favourite WordPress plugins for Twitter.

Twitter Tools

If you blog and Twitter, you need this. Twitter Tools can do a plethora of useful things, including:

• showing your last x tweets in your blog's sidebar (where x is a number you choose)
• tweeting when you blog* - you can have this on or off by default, and can override the default for any individual post
• archiving all your tweets to one blog post daily or weekly
• allowing you to tweet from your blog's sidebar or your WP dashboard

There are other tools that will let you do any one of these things, but as far as I know,Twitter Tools is the only one that will do all of them. It's a lovely bit of kit.

Changing Twitter Tools' default message

By default, Twitter Tools tweets "New blog post" + title + link. If you want to change this, go into Plugins > Edit, select Twitter Tools, and find the line:
$this->tweet_prefix = 'New blog post';
Change the words between the inverted commas to whatever you like: if you don't want a prefix at all, then delete them but make sure both inverted commas are still there. don't remove the text altogether because it's what the plugin uses to identify tweets it's created; if you remove the text and run twitter digest posts, you can end up with tweets going back and forth between Twitter and your blog forever!

Tweeting your RSS feed

If installing a plugin is too much like hard work, there are a number of services that will take your RSS feed and tweet it; the slight disadvantage of these is that they're less under your control than Twitter Tools would be. Twitterfeed is probably the best-known feed tweeter, though as of time of writing, they seem to be having a few problems. Pingvine is an alternative.

Easy link sharing

Tweet This adds a button to the bottom of your blog posts allowing your readers to easily post a link to their own Twitter streams. You might prefer Sociable or Share This as they allow posting to lots of other social media sites - Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon etc. etc. - as well as emailing the link to friends.

Add Twitter IDs to your comments

WP Twitip ID adds an extra text field to your comments form to allow your readers to add their Twitter IDs as well as their website links. You know your audience better than I do: if they're likely to have Twitter IDs, this is pretty cute, otherwise it's just another box to leave blank.

Tweetbacks : add tweets to your comments

If your readers are tweeting your posts, you might like to preserve those tweets as comments on the post itself. Joost's Tweetbacks plugin pulls Tweets referencing your post into your blog automatically. It does take a little setting up (you'll need to edit a couple of theme files) so make sure you read the implementation instructions.

If you tweet your blog posts, you might not want to include those tweets in your comments(!), so there's the option in the plugin settings to exclude your own ID or any other Twitter usernames you choose.

How are Twitter and WordPress interacting for you? If there's a plugin you love, leave us a comment.

Tags: Alex King, Pingvine, plugins, Tweet This, Tweetbacks, Twitter, Twitter Tools, Twitterfeed, WordPress, WP Twitip ID

Posted by Sue on April 29, 2009 in Plugins, Twitter, WordPress.