Brian Casel | Mashable
Do you have a blog? Chances are you have a Twitter account, too. Twitter and blogging (or running any type of business website) go hand-in-hand.
We use Twitter to drive traffic to our websites. We invite our website visitors to follow and engage with us on Twitter. One feeds the other and vice versa.
Many experts agree that WordPress is the best way to power your website, especially if you operate a blog. I can go on and on about what makes WordPress great, but let’s stick with its one outstanding benefit: There are so many great ways to integrate Twitter with your WordPress website.
This article will cover various ways to merge your Twitter presence with your website, and thus, maximize opportunities to relate to your web audience.
After all, that’s what really matters: your relationship with your audience. By closely aligning your website and your blog with your presence on Twitter, you’re inviting visitors to take their online relationship with you to the next level. It’s how you build trust online, increase engagement, and if you’re a business, increase the likelihood your audience will buy from you.
Here are six ways to tightly integrate your Twitter presence with your WordPress-powered website and take your online social presence to the next level.
1. Embedded Tweets
An embedded tweet is a single tweet, embedded within any webpage or blog post. This tweet comes packaged with Twitter functionality, including the retweet, reply and favorite buttons, as well as the timestamp. See below for an example of an embedded tweet:
New avatar. It was time.
Brian Casel @CasJam Luckily, WordPress makes this incredibly easy to do. Simply paste the URL of that tweet within the body of any page or post, and WordPress takes care of the rest.
2. Twitter Follow Button
If you’re very active on Twitter and want to align your website audience with your Twitter followers, you’ll want to make it easy for your website visitors to follow you on Twitter.
Include a Twitter follow button on your website. Unlike a simple, linked Twitter icon, the Twitter follow button allows visitors to follow you on Twitter with one click, without having to leave your website.
The Twitter follow button should be displayed on your website “globally,” which means it should be visible in the same place on every page of your website. I’d recommend placing it in the header or footer of your website.
Twitter provides a very easy tool to generate the embed code for the Twitter follow button. It even gives you several options, such as button size and display text.
You can paste that embed code in any website. If you’re able to edit your WordPress theme files, you can place this in the header.php or footer.php file.
But not everybody is comfortable with editing code and modifying his WordPress theme. Luckily, several plugins make it easy to embed a Twitter follow button without touching any code.
3. Tweet Button
The tweet button very effectively helps spread your content. When your blog post, article, video or podcast resonates with a visitor, the tweet button gives her a quick way to spread that piece of content to others.
Like the Twitter follow button, you can use Twitter’s easy tool to generate the embed code for a tweet button, which you can then place on each of your article pages.
When adding the tweet button to a WordPress website, you’ll want to add the code to in the appropriate location within your themes single.php file. This is the template file that controls all your blog post pages.
But once again, if you’re not comfortable with editing code, several WordPress plugins can add a tweet button for you:
One additional tool that I find particularly useful is Click to Tweet. This makes it easy to generate a text link that triggers a tweet pre-populated with the 140-character text of your choosing. You can then place that link anywhere in your articles and pages.
