30 Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog

Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has grown to create what most people would call a social media revolution. By the very nature of the short messages it hosts, Twitter is a wonderful marketing and promotion tool that no serious blogger can ignore.

In this article, we have compiled most useful Twitter plug-ins, hacks and tips for WordPress to help you get the most out of Twitter in your WordPress blog.

WordPress Twitter Hacks

Automatically provide tinyurls for your WordPress blog posts

Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
Are you on Twitter? I am. This service make an intensive use of tinyurls in order to reduce the size of urls. Why not provide automatically provide a tinyurl to your readers so they can use it on Tweeter?

Because of the restriction on character numbers in Twitter, you have to use a URL shorten when tweeting URLs. So, to help your readers tweet about your posts, you should definitely provide short URLs for all of your posts.

To achieve this code, simply open your functions.php file and paste the following code:

function getTinyUrl($url) {
    $tinyurl = file_get_contents("http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=".$url);
    return $tinyurl;
}

On your single.php file, paste the following within the loop:

ID));
echo 'Tiny Url for this post: '.$turl.''
?>

Source: Automatically provide tinyurls for your WordPress blog posts

Create a “Twitter This” Button for WordPress Posts

Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
Twitter is definitely a great way to gain exposure on the Web. This is why I created a fancy “Send to Twitter” button and implemented it on my blogs (see links at the bottom of the article).This is the basic code for a typical “Tweet This” Button, you can use some images or CSS styling to make it more attractive.

Spread on Twitter

Displaying Total Number Twitter Followers on WordPress Blog

Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
You are looking for way to display total number of your Twitter followers on your wordpress blog and update automatically. You can use this code to display your followers anywhere you want in wordpress, may be you want to display this number in Side Bar of your blog .

Open functions.php and paste this php function there.

function string_getInsertedString($long_string,$short_string,$is_html=false){
if($short_string>=strlen($long_string))return false;
$insertion_length=strlen($long_string)-strlen($short_string);
for($i=0;$isaveHTML();
$element->parentNode->removeChild($element);
$html2=$document->saveHTML();
return string_getInsertedString($html,$html2,true);
}  

function getFollowers($username){
$x = file_get_contents("http://twitter.com/".$username);
$doc = new DomDocument;
@$doc->loadHTML($x);
$ele = $doc->getElementById('follower_count');
$innerHTML=preg_replace('/^< [^>]*>(.*)< [^>]*>$/',"\\1",DOMElement_getOuterHTML($doc,$ele));
return $innerHTML;
}

Now simply use this code to display total number of your Twitter followers. Just replace our username “themeflash” with yours.

Of course you can further style it with CSS. You can also try some fancy background images or twitter bird. For example.

Proudly Followed by  Followers

Source: Displaying Total Number Twitter Followers on WordPress

Using Twitter avatars in comments without plug-ins

Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
I was pretty interested in the Twittar plug-in when it was first released and decided to look at the source to see how it works.So what about displaying Twitter avatars in your comments, instead of gravatars?

So you want to integrate Twitter avatars to your comments? No problem!

The first thing to do is to get the functions file here or here.

Once you have it, unzip the archive and open the twittar.php file. Select all its content and paste it to the functions.php file from your theme.

The last thing to do is to open your comments.php file and find the comments loops. Then, paste the following line inside it:

Source: Use Twitter avatars in comments

Your Twitter Feed on a Separate WordPress Page

Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
You might want to create a separate page on your WordPress blog for displaying your latest tweets and updates.First you will need to create a Twitter page template “twitter-page.php” (you can use different name) to display Twitter feed, paste the following code and add it to your blog.

Source: Your Twitter Feed on a Separate WordPress Page

Detect Visitors From Twitter

Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
Visitors coming to my blogs from Twitter now represent something like 10% of all my traffic, which is quite a lot. Because many Twitter users re-tweet blog posts that they like, it may be a very good idea to detect Twitter visitors, welcome them and, of course, remind them that their re-tweets are appreciated.

To do this, open your single.php file and paste these lines where you’d like your “Welcome Twitter user” message to be displayed.

Source: Detect Visitors From Twitter

Display your latest tweet as an image

Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
TwitSig is a twitter signature service provider that allows you to get an auto-updating image that displays your latest Twitter entry. You can use this image as your forum signatures, in WordPress posts, in blog sidebars or may be even in emails.

  1. Go to Twitsig.com. You don’t have to register: very nice!
  2. Simply enter your Twitter username in the text field.
  3. And your Twitter image is ready, displaying your latest tweet. The image is automatically updated when you update your Twitter status.
  4. Open any of your WordPress theme files and paste the following code (make sure to replace my username with yours!):

Display Latest Tweets From Multiple Users

Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
Now what you are looking for? Maybe you want to pull multiple tweets from multiple user accounts and display them. With the code below, you are able to define what you want before the Twitter block, after the Twitter block, before and after each individual tweet, and after the displayed user name. You can also turn off the displayed user names if you are looking to show all of your own personal tweets from multiple accounts!

", ">", $feed);
$clean = explode("", $feed);
$amount = count($clean) - 1;

for ($i = 1; $i <= $amount; $i++) {

$entry_close = explode("", $clean[$i]);
$clean_content_1 = explode("", $entry_close[0]);
$clean_content = explode("", $clean_content_1[1]);
$clean_name_2 = explode("", $entry_close[0]);
$clean_name_1 = explode("(", $clean_name_2[1]);
$clean_name = explode(")", $clean_name_1[1]);
$clean_uri_1 = explode("", $entry_close[0]);
$clean_uri = explode("", $clean_uri_1[1]);

echo $prefix_sub;
if ($show == 1) { echo "" . $clean_name[0] . "" . $wedge; }
echo $clean_content[0];
echo $suffix_sub;

}
}
echo $prefix;
parse_feed($usernames, $limit, $show, $prefix_sub, $wedge, $suffix_sub);
echo $suffix;
?>

Source : Display Latest Tweets From Multiple Users

Create a Twitter page on your WordPress blog

We already showed you how to display your latest tweet on your blog, in your sidebar for example. Another good way to introduce readers to your Twitter updates is to create a dedicated page for displaying your tweets, using the powerful “Page template” WordPress option.

To perform this hack, you need to know how to create and use page templates. If you’re not familiar with this, this article will tell you all you need to know.

Here’s the code to create a Twitter page template. Paste it in a new file, name the file something like twitter-page.php, for example, and then add it to your blog.

This code uses the wp_rss() function from WordPress core, which is an RSS reader. In the first argument I pass my Twitter RSS feed, and in the second argument I determine the number of entries to display.

Source : Create a Twitter page on your WordPress blog

WordPress Twitter Plugins

Twitter ReTweet

Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
Twitter ReTweet provides a function that displays a ReTweet link which gives visitors the ability to ReTweet the current post; supports custom URLs (perfect for Google Analytics Campaign Tracking).

Source : Twitter ReTweet

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

Twitter Tools integrates with Twitter by giving you the following functionality:

  • Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 10 minutes).
  • Create a blog post from each of your tweets.
  • Create a daily or weekly digest post of your tweets.
  • Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post.
  • Post a tweet from your sidebar.
  • Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens.
  • Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook).
  • Source : Twitter Tools

    Twitter for WordPress

    Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.

    Features

    * Simply
    * Customizable
    * Widget support
    * No options page (yes, its a feature)
    * Uses WordPress resources (no extra files needed)
    * Detects URLs, e-mail address and @username replies

    Usage
    If you use WordPress widgets, just drag the widget into your sidebar and configure. If widgets are not your thing, use the following code to display your public Twitter messages:

    Source : Twitter for WordPress

    Twitter Widget Pro

    Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
    A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username, #hashtag, and link parsing. It supports displaying profiles images, and even lets you control whether to display the time and date of a tweet or how log ago it happened (about 5 hours ago, etc). Requires PHP5.

    Source : Twitter Widget Pro

    WP to Twitter

    Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
    The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your WordPress blog using either the Cli.gs or Bit.ly URL shortening services to provide a link back to your post from Twitter.

    For both services you can provide your information to maintain a list of your shortened URLs with your URL shortening service for statistics and your own records.

    The plugin can send a default message for updating or editing posts or pages, but also allows you to write a custom Tweet for your post which says whatever you want. By default, the shortened URL from Cli.gs is appended to the end of your message, so you should keep that in mind when writing your custom Tweet.

    Any status update you write which is longer than the available space will automatically be truncated by the plugin. This applies to both the default messages and to your custom messages.

    Source : WP to Twitter

    Thread Twitter

    Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
    Thread Twitter fetch your tweets and display them in thread style.

    Source : Thread Twitter

    Twitter Poster

    The Twitter Poster is a plugin which allows wordpress publishers to automatically post their new posts to their Twitter account. The Twitter Poster will take the title of a new post and will subit it to the Twitter account specified in the options. It will also add the link back to the post, allowing your twitter followers to access the post details.

    Source : Twitter Poster

    Twitter Friendly Links

    So, you promote your blog posts via Twitter, huh? Me too. And those long blog post URLs, ugh! Yeah, we got rid of those using URL shortening services like TinyURL and tr.im but what about the name and/or brand? Your blog posts might be fab – very interesting to read and three thousand comments on each. But are you getting people to remember your website address in Twitter? No. Do you get backlinks from Twitter using TinyURL? No. Can you measure site statistics from TinyURL links on Twitter? No.

    Source : Twitter Friendly Links

    Wickett Twitter Widget

    Display tweets from a Twitter account in the sidebar of your blog. As seen on WordPress.com.

    Source : Wickett Twitter Widget

    Twitter Blog

    Twitter Blog will not only tweet your blog post, but it will also check hourly for replies to that tweet and turn it into a comment on that blog post. It also uses the bit.ly API for URL shortening and adds link generated to your bit.ly account for tracking purposes.

    Source : Twitter Blog

    Twitter Goodies

    Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
    This plugin shows your twitter profile/search tweets under Sidebar Area (Widget), Post and/or Pages. Tweets will REFRESH AUTOMATICALLY. Also it has reply option inside widget on mouse over action. Admin panel option available under Settings -> Twitter Goodies to set different color combination and twitter widget options. This twitter widget is using Twitter Goodies APIs. Integrate Post to Twitter option added to v1.0.1. Best Twitter Tools and nice Twitter Widget GUI.

    Source : Twitter Blog

    TweetSuite

    TweetBacks are great, but they’re just a single feature, the integration of Twitter and blogging can and should go much deeper than that.

    Source : TweetSuite

    TwitterCounter

    Allows you to integrate TwitterCounter.com badges on your blog. Additionally, you can add the Twitter Remote to your blog, which shows which twitter users recently visited your blog or website. Manually add where you would like to display the badge / remote or use the WordPress sidebar widgets instead.

    Source : TwitterCounter

    Tweet This

    Adds a “Tweet This Post” link to every post and page. Shortens URLs. Can automatically tweet new and scheduled blog posts. Customizable (check screenshots). Also included: Plurk, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Ping.fm, Reddit, and StumbleUpon support.

    Source : Tweet This

    Twitme

    Twitme 1.6.9.7 fixes the problem that was caused by the 1.6.9.6 version. The problem was that json_encode was not found on php4 systems

    Note: Twitme does not work in combination with other Twitter plugins like “Twitter Tools”. Make sure you disable those plugins before you install Twitme (This goes for any version of Twitme).

    Source : Twitme

    Tweetable

    Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
    Tweetable is intended to help integrate Twitter into your blog. It can automatically tweet links to your blog posts as they are published. It can display your lastest tweet in your sidebar and add a tweetmeme widget after your posts. You can even use it to share a Twitter account among a blog’s author’s if you wish.

    Source : Tweetable

    Twitter Feed

    The application will display the latest tweet from all of the active accounts and then displays those latest tweets in date order. So the newest tweet across all of the accounts will always be shown first. It is also possible to switch between allowing/disallowing PM (Private Message) tweets to be included in the display.

    Source : Twitter Feed

    @ Reply

    Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog
    This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments. When clicked, those links insert the author name and a link to the comment you are replying to in the textarea.

    Source : @ Reply

    TweetMeme Button

    The TweetMeme retweet button easily allows your blog to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been retweeted throughout twitter.

    Source : TweetMeme Button

    Found something missing in this post?

    While compiling this stuff on this post, it’s possible that we miss some other great hack and plugins. Do not hesitate to share it with us in Comments so that we can add instantly.

    Our high quality 650-393 and mcts dumps provide you definite guarantee for passing the 70-169, MB2-186 exams. It is also helpful for 642-813 exam.

    Author: Wajid Khan
    Wajid Khan is a founder of Themeflash, He is blogging on here since one year with a great article and also he is available for freelancing in Designing and Programming. You can follow me on Twitter

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    42 Comments on "30 Twitter Hacks and Plugins to Spice Up Your WordPress Blog"

    1. Thanks Buddy. Very nice hacks.

      • Arjen says:

        We use the twittercounter widget daily to check who visits our site. On the management console, via twittercounter, you an directly follow your most loyal visitors. It so cool to see, this twitter user visited you site for the 45th time.

        The widget is also on our conference site. We DM/ tweet mention people who visit manhy pages. This already lead to direct conversion.

        Great tool.

    2. Kak Abbas says:

      Nice tips..! ^^

    3. Mitch McLeod says:

      Love these hacks!
      I’m in the process of building my first wordpress site so this has come at just the right time for me!

      Thanks heaps! :)

    4. Jackson C says:

      The concept of retweeting exists because of good articles like this. Great stuff!

    5. favSHARE says:

      This article has been shared on favSHARE.net. Go and vote it!

    6. Inspiradores says:

      Great!. I will use some of them.

    7. SM says:

      Great tips. Thanks

    8. Great resource and an amazing article. I use most of the plugins and hacked mentioned here and twitter is a major asset to The Inside Design for traffic. Once again great article :)

    9. always looking out for the best hacks to improve my site and twitter integration.

    10. Thanks for the post. I found it really helpful in improving Twitter in my blog and my website

    11. frydek says:

      How do I share twitter feeds, directly from a twitter-wordpress-widget?

      Like adding a “sharethis” button after every tweet in a twitter widget like twitter-widget-pro? So I can spread any tweet directly from my blog?

    12. LEE says:

      Thank for articles. Now I use plugins wp to twitter for update my blog to twitter account automatically , it’s work for me. :-)

    13. How do I share twitter feeds, directly from a twitter-wordpress-widget , Somebody can help me please?

    14. Now I use plugins wp to twitter for update my blog works fine.

    15. you tube says:

      This is a really automatic twitter plugin , I hope this plugin be developed in the right way.

    16. Great information! This is so useful because i use twitter a lot. Thanks

    17. jack says:

      I really believe that, someone is reading my tweets, although I’ve protected my tweets? Is it possible to access the protected tweets of other people without following them?

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