Automatic Tweets With WordPress

My experiment with automatic tweets seems to be coming along nicely.

At first, I was worried that people might not respond well to automated messages being posted to my Twitter account, but it seems that my auto tweet plug-in generates fairly benign messages.  Besides, with the volume of Twitter traffic your average person gets, my single message here and there doesn’t seem to be too big of a deal.

Automatic Tweeting Options – TweetSuite

For my blog, I’ve been using TweetSuite, a WordPress plug-in that is the successor to the TweetBacks plug-in.

Frankly, I didn’t do any kind of evaluation about what kind of plug-ins there were out there to handle Twitter integration with WordPress.  I just happened to be reading something and came across a reference to TweetSuite and thought I would try it out.

TweetSuite has some nice features.  First, it is pretty straightforward to configure. No questions that you won’t already know the answer to if you are even a beginning level user of Twitter and WordPress.

Second, it doesn’t just tweet about each new post.  It also has a My Tweets widget that lets you put a item in your sidebar that lists your most recent tweets.  In that way, it provides both Twitter to WordPress integration and WordPress to Twitter integration.

Automatic Tweets – Other Options

Other plug-ins I have come across since installing TweetSuite include WordTwit and Twitter Tools.  I get the feeling there are a dozen more, although it seems that most of them are more concerned with getting your Twitter tweets over to your WordPress blog instead of sending off an auto tweet based on a WordPress post.

The fact is that I’m not a Twitter fanatic and I don’t really know how much value it brings.  I know there are those out there who insist it is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but the fact remains that 85% of the people who show up here at ArcticLlama come from the search engines and most everyone else seems to come “direct”.

For the most part, I do Twitter solely so that clients who ask about “social networking” but don’t really know what they are asking about can see my Twitter-ness since everyone knows about Twitter.  (I started doing Facebook for the same reason, but there I’ve ended up actually connecting with real friends and most of the gang from both elementary school and middle school.)

Still, it certainly can’t hurt, and I’m going to take a look at more options.  The one feature I would like to see is a way to tweak what it is that gets sent to Twitter from WordPress.  Last week, a post I made here ended up as a rather odd tweet because of a long title for the post.  Automatically running the tweets through a URL shortening service would probably be a useful feature as well.

If you are looking to get tweets sent to your Twitter account every time you post, a WordPress plug-in like TweetSuite is the way to go.