How to Display Twitter Updates on Your WordPress Blog
Adding Twitter Updates to WordPress
WordPress is undoubtedly the most popular blogging platform in the world. It is used by millions of bloggers and can be easily personalized to one’s liking by using custom themes and plugins. There are thousands of plugins available online which can be easily downloaded and installed on your WordPress blog.
Twitter is the world’s number one micro-blogging service which is used by even more people. The ability to post what’s happening in your life - in 140 characters or less - has become a popular way for people to just give shout outs on their daily lives, as well as telling their followers about what’s going on with their blog or website.
Combining this two is a simple process that can ensure that all of your followers gets tweets about your WordPress blog.
WordPress Plugins
There are a wide variety of different ways of getting tweets on a WordPress blog. The simplest way is that of using WordPress’ own
plugins - the Twitter widget and the sharing settings of the blog itself. When you first set up and begin your blog, you’ll be asked if you want to add some of the widget selections that go within your blog’s sidebar.
The sidebar can hold everything from RSS updates to stats about your blog to…Twitter updates. This widget basically adds all of the tweets that you create whenever you create them and who they are going to, more importantly it allows your readers who weren’t following you on Twitter to click on your name or Twitter title in order to be brought to your Twitter profile.
How can this help your blog? Simple. It allows for people to find you on Twitter, thus allowing them to not only follow your tweets, but follow your tweets in regards to your blog.
Another aspect of WordPress that will help get the word out about your blog is that of the sharing settings. The share settings are where you can add some buttons that will help people share your particular blog posts to their favorite social media sites. WordPress currently has Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Reddit, Press This, email, and printing.
While signed in to your WordPress account, head to the settings options and then choose ‘sharing’. Here, you can also add your own accounts to help promote your blog by sharing your updates with friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and MSN Messenger. This will automatically update your profiles on these whenever you update your blog. Under this is where you can add sharing buttons for your readers, so that they can share your blog to their friends and family.
How Does This Help Your Blog?
As mentioned, having the ability to share not only your tweets on your blog, but allow your readers to tweet them to their friends and family allows for better exposure. With the WordPress plugins, your readers can tweet aspects of your blog to their friends and family, who might just stumble on to your site. If you have your own tweets updating, they can then 1. see that you’re an active person that talks to their followers and 2. find your Twitter profile, with the hopeful intention that they plan on following you as well.
Tweets on WordPress don’t have to be limited to just you and your readers; you can also post tweets that are relevant to your blog’s topic or allow for readers to post comments from Twitter. The great thing about WordPress is that it has in place different methods in which to help you promote yourself and your blog.
References
WordPress Plugin Directory, https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/tweets
Freelancer R blog, https://freelancerr.wordpress.org
Image credit: Freelancer R
