Photo nicked from Twitter

I ran a poll last week asking if you were planning to , or already had integrated your blog with Twitter.  The results polarised into two camps, either you were already inhtegrating or you were looking into it.  This post is for the later group of readers.

Why Integrate WordPress with Twitter

Darren Rowse from Problogger brought to my attention the idea of a Homebase and Outposts approach to blogging and social media sites. This is something I strongly belive in this approach, read the post for a full descrption, but in brief it says that yoru home base (or blog) is your main property from where you do your main work, and the outposts are areas you push your work to.  Using twitter integration tools you can simplfy pushing blogs posts from your home base out to your outputs.

The three main reason I integate with twitter are:

• The main reason I integrate with Twitter is to market my blog content to a wider auduence, this is made much more steamlined with Twitter plugins.
• Increasing productivity is another reaso0n to integrate, most bloggers spend a huge amount of time developing and marketing their site, if this can be made more efficient that time can be spent on other more important taks such as content development.
• You do not own our content on Twitter/facebook or any of the other social sites, you need a place to call your own where you house your original content.  If you have a business blog, this will be where your call to action to generate income will be.

Enter The Plugin

There is always a plugin, and my Twitter integration plugin of choice that I use it Twitter tools by Alex King, it is a bi-directional post to tweet, tweet to post and tweet to widget fun fest

Download Twitter Tools

Download and install the plugin as you would any other, then the only other bit of configuration is to add your twitter user ID and password.

If you use other plugins, please feel free to tell me about them in teh commnets of thsi post.

Posts as Tweets

The main feature I use in this plugin is the ability to push posts as tweets into Twitter.  Using this fucntionality I create a tweet which says “new at my blog Integrating Twitter with WordPress http://tinyurl.com/xyc” this tiny URL then send Tweepl back to the original post.

You can push all posts to Twitter, or opt them out.  I only push out my key work in this way not every little post I publish on my blog.

Tweets Summarised into A post

The plugin allows bi-directional updates so you can then republish your tweets as a post.

Due to the small nature of tweets you can opt to publish single tweets or a digest of daily or weekly tweets into a post.

This is not a function I use, but If you are pushing out a lot of short valuable content into Twitter it will make sense to expose this to yoru non-twittering readers.

Tweets in a Sidebar Widget

Last but by no means least is the ability to push your tweets into a sidebar widget rather than a blog post.

BONUS Integration

I don’t want to sound like an infomercial, but you get all of the twitter integration plus a bonus Facebook integration when you read thsi post.

Twitter has created a Facebook application.  If you install the app on your Facebook page it will pull your tweets and stick them on your Facebook  profile as updates.

I have decided which outpost to concentrate on (Twitter) but I always like an automated outpost with which I can expand my blogs audience.