Use twitter with Wordpress

Twitter is a great tool to get your message out to lots of people in a hurry. Twitter allows messages (called ‘tweets’) to be up to 140 characters long, which is great for short blasts of useful information.

Since the twitter API is very robust, you can update your twitter page from the web, a variety of mac/linux/windows desktop applications, your cell phone/PDA and even your Wordpress blog!

Why use twitter with Wordpress?

Twitter is used by millions of people every day who are searching for up to the minute news and information. Twitter is searched and aggregated by many social media platforms including Facebook. By announcing your blog posts to twitter, you are tapping a potential audience that might not normally read your RSS feed or find your blog through traditional methods such as blogrolls or search engine traffic.

Twitter has a handy search feature that lets you search all tweets via the web or RSS. Here are the results for ‘Frank Schilling’ and ‘domain names’. Many companies and individuals (including me) are using the RSS search feature to monitor search phrases, names and even reputation management.

[I'll write about how to do reputation management with the RSS feature in a later post]

How to announce your blogs posts on twitter

The best way to announce your blog posts on twitter is to install a wordpress plugin that integrates into your twitter account and does all the work for you. I prefer using a plugin so that I have a little more control, than using a 3rd party application such as twitterfeed.

My favourite plugin is Twitter Tools from Alex King. The plugin gives you two-way functionality with your twitter account.

You can announce your blog posts to your twitter page as soon as you post them, as well as display your tweets right on your blog via a handy sidebar widget.

If you have a product to sell or a brand to build, I think you will find twitter is a valuable tool to get the word out about your brand as well as communicate with your audience or customers.

If you have an questions or need any assistance, please feel free to comment below.