Tips

Twitterfy Your Blog

Did you know that your blog and your Twitter account can work together?

Adding some Twitter elements to your blog can pool together the audience for your blog with the audience for your Twitter account. Not only is it a way to promote on both platforms, but a way to generate interesting comments, and broaden your online community. For those of you who blog for class purposes, it’s a great way to reach outside of your classroom peers.

Automatically Tweet Links to Blog Posts

WordTwit is a plugin that generates a new Tweet every time you publish a new blog post. The embedded tweet below is an example of this plugin at work – it’s made up of the title of the blog post, a link to the post and any other text (including hashtags) you may want to add to all of your blog-based tweets.

Once activated, this plugin’s settings can be found under Settings > WordTwit. Just follow the on-screen instructions to authorize your Twitter account and get started!

Tip: Keep your blog post titles clear and concise! Remember that it needs to fit into a tweet, along with any added text and the link!

Display Tweets on your Blog

Tweet Blender is a sidebar widget that lists recent Tweets by a specified user, hashtag, or keyword!

Once activated, this plugin’s settings can be found under Settings > Tweet Blender. The most useful options are all in the General, Widgets and Archives tabs. Try different combinations of settings until it looks and works the way you want.

Tip: Enable the Archive page in Tweet Blender. This saves the tweets that it pulls into its own page. This is a great way to keep a record of tweets that were relevant to your blog!

Embed Tweets on a Post or Page

Tweets can be embedded in any post or page, with all of the original links intact! Not only does this allow you to share the information from the tweet, but it adds some visual interest that you wouldn’t get from simply cutting & pasting the text. You can also embed an entire conversation!

  1. Locate the tweet you want to embed, on Twitter.com*, and hover your mouse over it.
  2. Click the More button, and select Expand. Click the grey Details link, found next to the date of the tweet. This will open the tweet on its own page.
  3. Go to the address bar of your browser, at the top of the screen. Highlight, then copy the entire URL (web address) of the tweet into your clipboard, by right-clicking and selecting Copy from the contextual menu.
  4. In any post or page on your blog, click the Text tab on the textbox editor.
  5. Paste the code on its own line (not on the same line as any other text or content), by right-clicking in the editor window and selecting Paste from the contextual menu.
  6. Click Preview to see that it works before you Publish.

*Steps 1 & 2 are specific to Twitter.com. If you use other apps to access tweets (like Tweet Deck, Hoot Suite, etc.), the steps to get to the tweet’s own webpage may be different.

Your embedded tweet will look something like this: