5 Ways To Integrate Twitter With Your WordPress Site

WordPress is a very large publishing platform that is powering hundreds of thousands of blogs. Hence, it is very popular. And so is Twitter. If you’re a blogger, then chances are, that you use Twitter for your updates and fan engagement, because Twitter undoubtedly is one of the best tools for building audience and socializing with others. You can use Twitter to divert some traffic to your blog, and also use your blog to direct potential followers to your Twitter profile. For that to work, you need to closely integrate your Twitter account with your WordPress site. Here, we will discuss the top 5 ways you can do that.

By merging your Twitter account with your website, and constantly enforcing the concept, you add some level of authority to your website, and establish an identity on social media. By this integration, you invite your visitors to take their relationship with you to the next level. And that is how you build trust and increase your engagement with your loyal visitors. So here are the top 5 ways you should integrate the two together.

1. Add Twitter Follow Button

Probably one of the first things that you should do when setting up a blog is adding a Twitter follow button. This isn’t the ordinary Twitter icon that links to your Twitter profile. When a user clicks on the button, he’ll start following you automatically with just one click if he’s logged into Twitter. This way, users won’t have to leave your website to follow you.

You can see our ‘Subscribe Now’ section in the left sidebar. It has a Twitter follow button. Remember: This button should be site-wide, and not just on one page. Notice how the ‘Subscribe Now’ section stays at its place when you open a new post or page on this site. It would be best if you add this follow button to your header, footer, or your sidebar, so it’s always accessible.

To add this button manually, you can use Twitter’s great button tool that generates the embed codes for you. If you’re not comfortable with coding, then you can simply install a plugin, such as the Twitter Follow Button plugin.

2. Tweet Button

This is just like the Follow button, but this time, the button prompts users to tweet a post or page with a single click (provided that they are logged in first). This should be added to every post or page. Again, you can either install a plug-in to do this for you, such as the WP Tweet Button, or you can use Twitter’s code generator to create the embed code for you, and then add it manually to your theme file (usually single.php or post.php). This button usually comes with social media sharing widgets, such as Digg Digg, ShareThis, AddThis and so on.

3. Auto-publishing blog posts

Now that we’ve added some buttons, it’s time to start sharing. One can’t always be logged into Twitter to tweet a latest blog post. And nor is it advisable to tweet a post at an odd time of the day. You should set up RSS feed for your blog, and then use this RSS feed to feed a social media dashboard such as HootSuite. You can also use a simpler tool, such as Twitter Feed for this purpose. For WordPress blogs, you can generally find the feed at yourblog.com/feed (for eg, smartearningmethods.com/feed).

4. Recent Tweets

Now that you’ve tweeted some of your posts, it’s time to show them on your website. Once again, Twitter makes this incredibly easy. Log into your Twitter and visit this Widget Configuration page. You can get the code, and easily add it to your sidebar of your footer. You can use the Recent Tweets plugins to achieve the same purpose as well. If you’re using JetPack, then such a widget will be available to you by default in Dashboard >> Appearance >> Widgets.

5. Comments

And now for the comments. Comments are valuable to any blog, and they show how much engaged the visitors are. That’s why you need to provide convenience to those people who comment on your blog. You can add a Tweet button to users comments, so that they can tweet their comment. You can use the Disqus Commenting System for this purpose. Alternatively, you can the Simple Twitter Connect aimed at enhancing Twitter Integration with your WordPress site. There’s also a Twitter Mentions as Comments plugin that allows users to comment what they have already Tweeted.

Those were the top 5 ways you could integrate Twitter with WP. I know we went a bit fast, but if you have a problem with any part, let us know in the comments below, and we’ll explain the process or clarify a problem. Peace 🙂