11 Epic Wordpress Plugins for Twitter
In celebration of the awesomeness of Wordpress and the epicness of Twitter, today we salute the best Wordpress plugins that bring these two powerhouses together in a festival of web 2.0 communication empowerment.
Using Twitter to communicate your marketing or product message is a key part of todays internet marketing toolkit.
Perhaps you ‘Tweet’ a lot and want to wrap your updates into a Wordpress blog post, or you blog frequently and need to let your Twitter network know what you are doing. Well, there are a whole host of ways to integrate your workflow in smarter ways.
If you go out searching for Twitter plugins for Wordpress, you’ll find hundreds of them, all available to you for free. However, a lot of them do the same thing, do it poorly or are just totally lame, so we’ve done the research for you to produce our list of the 11 most epic.
How do I get them?
You can download them by clicking the titles or you can search for them from within Wordpress by going to ‘Plugins » Add New’.
1. SexyBookmarks – Share your blog posts with Twitter
Description: Of all the many Wordpress plugins that allow your visitors to share your blog post to the multitude of social networks, SexyBookmarks was the standout winner. It looks amazing, with it’s contemporary design and is fun to use with it’s perfect interaction and animation.
What does it do?
When you use the SexyBookmarks plugin, you get a series of configurable icons that allow your readers to pass your post on to their favorite social network, like Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Reddit and of course Twitter.
You can see it in action if you scroll to the bottom of this page. It looks like this:
URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sexybookmarks/
2. Twitter Tools – Automatically tweet when you post
Description: Twitter Tools allows you to send an automated Tweet to your Twitter account whenever you publish a blog post, helping to spread the word to your network. It can also create a daily or weekly digest post on your blog containing everything you Tweeted during that period. It’s this bi-directional feature that makes it so useful, especially if you use Twitter frequently.
URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/
3. Tweet Cloud – Your most popular twitter words
Description: Tweet Cloud allows you to show a tag cloud made up of the most popular words and phrases from your own personal Tweets. This allows you to direct your readership to the topics that you are interested in.
URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweet-cloud/
4. Twitter LiveBlog – Create live blog posts with this Wordpress plugin
Description: This one is very cool. LiveBlog allows you to do Live Blogging via Twitter. Essentially what this means is that from your phone (or the web) you can tweet about an event as it happens and it will be consolidated into a single Wordpress blog post. It has the double impact of creating an ongoing blog post about something in real time, while also keeping your Twitter network up to date.
URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-liveblog/
5. Twitter Friends Widget
Description: This widget allows you to show your friends and followers in your Wordpress blog sidebar in the same way that it appears on your Twitter account.
URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-friends-widget/
6. WP Greet Box – Welcome your Twitter visitors
Description: WP Greet Box shows a personalized message to visitors to your blog. At the top of a blog post, your readers will get a welcome message tailored to the site they arrived from. So, as an example, if you sent out a tweet about something cool and a Twitter follower clicked through to visit your blog, they would get a Twitter branded welcome message reminding them to re-tweet your blog post if they like it. Pretty cool.
Also works for all of the other social networks and provides plenty of customization options so you can control what the greeting message is.
URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-greet-box/
7. Twitter Widget Pro
Description: A sidebar widget for your Wordpress blog that displays Twitter content. The cool thing about it is that it maintains all of the links in the Tweets to keep it interactive.
URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-widget-pro/
8. Twitter Tracker
Description: Another sidebar widget. This one lets you specify a Twitter search or a hashtag, and display a corresponding result set from Twitter. Great for adding related content to a post. For example, if you have a page about Britney Spears (shame on you), you could get a set of Twitter results for that young lady appearing directly on your page. A great value add.
URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tracker/
9. Twittley Button
Description: You can sign up for Twittley using your Twitter credentials and then you are logged in forever. Now, when you tweet, your message will also be broadcast to the Twittley website giving you extra exposure. Not a bad way to gain an extra set of potential readers.
URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twittley-button/
10. Twitterdoodle – Generate Wordpress blog posts
Description: If you want to crate a quick blog post about a certain subject. You can use this plugin to generate a Wordpress blog post about a specific Twitter term. If you run a Real Estate blog, you could publish a daily Real Estate Twitter news feed post that would consolidate what the Twittersphere is saying about your subject of choice, houses.
URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitterdoodle/
11. Twitter Friendly Links – Use short URLs with one of the best Wordpress Plugins
Description: This one goes hand in hand with the re-tweet feature of SexyBookmarks. What Twitter Friendly Links does is create Twitter friendly short URLs for your blog posts. If you’ve ever tried to enter a long website address into Twitter you’ll know that it automatically converts it to a shortened version, like TinyURL. This is all well and good, but it means that you are placing non-branded links into your Tweets.
This plugin allows you to have shortened URLs based on your own blog’s domain. For example, the short link to the post you are reading is http://onenightsite.com/249. So now you can embed this in your Tweets (and elsewhere). We love this plugin, definitely one of our favorites.
URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-friendly-links/
Do you know of any other Epic Wordpress Plugins for Twitter?
We hope you found this list useful, and we’d love to hear from you if you have any other useful and cool Wordpress plugins to add to our Twitter list. Comment below with your top picks.
Hugs & Tweets,
Joel
A big thanks for including Twittley as one of your epic twitter wordpress plugins.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard the term epic used to describe us before.
[Reply]
One Night Site Reply:
June 23rd, 2009 at 2:18 am
You’re very welcome. Twittley itself is a pretty cool name.
[Reply]
SexyBookmarks (Josh)
…and a big country “thank ya” for including SexyBookmarks in your list of “Epic” Twitter plugins!
Most people simply copy the description of the plugin and post it in their roundup, but you actually took the time to write a few sentences about it… To me, that shows character! Not only that… but you’re actually using it as well! Bravo!
Thanks again!
Josh Jones
[Reply]
SexyBookmarks (Josh) Reply:
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:35 am
Oh BTW, I forgot to mention that the upcoming v2.5.2 is gonna be HOOOGE!
Many many many changes, additions, and upgrades in the works!
Keep rockin!
(sneak peeks – http://twitpic.com/photos/eight7teen )
[Reply]
One Night Site Reply:
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:41 am
SexyBookmarks is the most elegantly designed social sharing plugin we’ve seen, and there are a lot of them out there. Thanks for making something cool.
[Reply]
One Night Site
Someone mentioned today that WordTwit should be on this list.
It seems to be a simpler version of TwitterTools, but as there are multiple plugins that do that type of thing, I’d like to ask if anyone knows why you would pick one over the other?
Anyone using WordTwit that wants to provide some opinion?
[Reply]
Frac Reply:
January 17th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
I found TwitterTools generated a lot of errors in my error log, and I just got PHP garbage when I tried to use the Widget. So many reasons for that, though, it shouldn’t be considered a negative review. It is the reason I went looking for something else and found WordTwit.
I really liked that it seemed “lighter”. It also has a great feature that can user your own domain for URL shortening and count the clicks when the short URL’s are used. It even has a feature to convert all external URLs on your site into local short URLs if you want. Further, you can have a banner for your site appear above those external web pages if you want such things.
I haven’t tried either of those particular features, though.
In short: Thumbs down (personally) for TweetTools and a big thumbs up for WordTwit.
[Reply]
carlo
Not at all unlike WP Tweet, socialize me is nice.
It takes a lot more ’social’ media/bookmarking sites into consideration and displays a message when you arrive at the destination (wordpress powered) site to acknowledge that you came from the referring social X site.
It’s for sure an honorable mention. Props to Wayne for making it.
[Reply]
carlo Reply:
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:50 am
Gah, the URL is http://www.blahblahtech.com/2008/01/wordpress-plugin-socialize-me.html – its called “Socialize Me”.
[Reply]