If you’ve got a WordPress blog and a Twitter account but haven’t linked the two, you’re definitely missing a trick. Twitter is an excellent way of promoting your blog posts to your Twitter followers because it provides both instant exposure to your content and an easy way for those followers to then ReTweet the link (the Twitter equivalent of the email ‘Forward’) to their followers. There’s no need to wait for Google to crawl the post and offer it up in its results to get your message in front of people – in fact, there’s a good chance you’re reading this from a ReTweeted post yourself.
With that in mind, let’s move on to the plugin that makes this integration so simple.
Twitter Tools
First you need to get Twitter Tools, the plugin that actually tweets your blog post in the first place. Download the zip file, extract it all to a folder and upload the folder to your site under ‘your-blog-name/wp-content/plugins’.
From the WordPress Dashboard, choose Plugins and notice that there are actually four separate plugins that are installed when you integrate Twitter Tools:
- Twitter Tools
- Twitter Tools – Bit.ly URLs
- Twitter Tools – Exclude Category
- Twitter Tools – Hashtags.
We’ll just be dealing with number 1, the main plugin. Click Activate, and then choose Settings to input your Twitter username and password. Set the ‘Enable option to create a tweet when you post in your blog’ drop-down to Yes. You’ll also want to set the ‘Tweet prefix for new blog posts’. This is what will be in the first part of the tweet, e.g.:
Bob’s Widgets: A great new range of widgets just launched! http://bit.ly/g45sA
Leave all other options as they are and save your details. Everything’s now set up and you should see your next blog post is instantly delivered to your Twitter account. The bit.ly integration in the example above is done automatically, which is nice.
