Integrate Your Blog and Twitter

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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?

Categories: Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, Commentary, Plugins, Social Media, WordPress