Twitter Plugins for WordPress

EDIT: Ashton from the Future here. This post is now dated. Please check out our latest posts.

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I just searched the WordPress Plugins section for “twitter” and I got 17 pages of plugins and most of them are crap… ugh.

All I want is a Twitter Plugin that will:

1. Send a tweet to my twitter when I post on my blog.
2. Adds a re-tweet link to each blog post.

How difficult can this be? After installing a few highly-rated plugins, and not being satisfied, I decided to write up what I found. This is only 6 of the most popular twitter plugins I could find. If you know of a better one, please let me know so I can check it out. This is in order of Best to Good. I don’t have any crappy plugins on this list. They should all work, at least partially.

Twitter Tools – v1.6

WordPress Plugin Page

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

Well that’s a promising introduction. It’s a very simple installation, and just about everything is editable in an easily-accessible Twitter Tools Page. Put in your information, select your preferences, and you are good to go.

Here are some features included in Twitter Tools:

• Create a blog post from each of your tweets (You can set this to be off, default or manual)
• 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
• Widget ready
• Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)

All of these functions can be turned off or on at will. I definitely don’t like having a daily or weekly digest of my tweets on this blog, so I have it turned off. No problem. (There is a very detailed FAQ on the WordPress Plugin Page.)

Tweet This – v1.3.9

WordPress Plugin Page

Adds a “Tweet This Post” link to every post and page. Shortens URLs in advance through Th8.us, eating up only 19 of 140 characters. Customize under Settings > Tweet This. By Richard X. Thripp.

This pluging was a great surprise to me. I was expecting a very simple “Tweet this” button, but there is much more. It also adds links for plurk. buzz, delicious, digg, ping, reddit and stumble. Which was something I wanted to do anyway, so now I’ve got it on my blog!

No template updates are required for this plugin, and I love where the buttons ended up. (There are quite a variety of buttons to choose from, and you probably could upload your own if you wanted.

TweetSuite – v0.6

A WordPress Plugin to integrate Twitter and WordPress By Dan Zarrella.

Although this plugin is still in beta, it’s got a lot of features.

• Insert the “Tweet-This” button in each post automatically or manually.
• Tell the “Tweet-This” button to float left or right.
• Widgets available: Favorites and My Tweets
• Connects to Tweetbacks; which is another plugin/feature Dan Zarrella developed.

For some reason, the cute Retweet Button only ended up linking to the same page I was on. I may have done something wrong, and it’s a shame because this plugin finally has both the ReTweet Button and will automatically tweet your posts. Any ideas what I did wrong? I think it may be because I need to publish the post while the plugin is activated… or add a custom field for the link…

Twitter ReTweet – v1.0

WordPress Plugin Page

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). By Matt Jurmann.

One of this Plugins best features is that it has the ability to encode URLs with custom query parameters and then encode those URLs into a format suitable for micro-blogging. This was designed for use with Google Analytics making it easy to see how well your re-tweets are working for you.

The odd parts of this one is you need to put your Twitter name into the nickname field in your /wp-admin/profile.php.

You also need to use the custom field of ‘retweet_url’ to tell Twitter ReTweet what link you want to send people to.

Finally, you update your template with this code:

<?php if(function_exists('twitterReTweet')) {
        echo twitterReTweet();
    }?>

In the end: Twitter ReTweet comes with some extra features, but you have a little extra work to set it up and put it into each post. Not recommended for the HTML novice.

Twitter for WordPress – v1.9.3

WordPress Plugin Page

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

This is a simple and self explanitory plugin. Although Twitter provides code to post your recent tweets on your website, this plugin is very popular (~70,000 downloads and 5 stars). You can use it as a widget or Drop a simple line of code into your template where you want it.

Twitter Widget Pro – v1.0.3

WordPress Plugin Page

Adds a sidebar widget to display Twitter updates (uses the Javascript Twitter ‘badge’)

This is another simple and self-explanatory plugin. It puts the Twitter badge javascript code into your wigitized sidebar.

Summary

Although Twitter Suite looks to be perfect in that it has both the “Tweet-This” button and it sends your posts to your twitter, I can’t get Tweet This function to work for me. So I currently have Twitter Tools and Tweet This enabled on this blog.

Did I miss a good Twitter Plugin? Please let me know in the comments.

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders