There are many WordPress twitter plugins in the market today. We examined quite a few of them to find the best twitter plugin for WordPress. To be honest, it is difficult to sort through twitter wordpress plugins as most of them provides a similar functionality. Some plugins let your visitors to (re)tweet your posts, some grab your tweets and shows in sidebar, some twitter plugins automatically tweet your blog posts and so on. Our criteria for best twitter plugin for WordPress is the following:
- The plugin should provide as much functionality as possible.
- The plugin should be updated regularly to keep up with the api changes at twitter.
- It should be easy to configure.
- It has to use minimum system resources
- It should be free
Verdict: Best twitter plugin for WordPress is Twitter Tools. Basically, Twitter tools integrates your WordPress blog with a twitter account. You can configure Twitter Tools in such a way that it can cross-post a link on Twitter whenever you publish a new blog post. Similarly, it can grab your tweets and publish them as blog posts. If you set it to post your tweets as blog posts and blogs posts as tweets, it will recognize the original post or tweet and won’t publish it more than once. Twitter Tools, Best free twitter plugin for WordPress, has been maintained by Alex King, who was original contributor to WordPress. He has been developing cool stuff for WordPress and other open source projects and is very likely to be around to keep the plugin up-to-date. Twitter Tools also provides the following functionality:
- It lets you archive your tweets. I personally found other tools unreliable and prefer to keep a copy of tweets at wordpress.
- It creates a blog post from each of your tweet.
- It can even create daily or weekly digest posts of your tweets.
- It can create a tweet from your blog post. The tweet has a link pointing to original blog post. It can shorten the link by using your bit.ly account.
- You can create a tweet from your WordPress blog’s sidebar or admin panel.
If you are seriously interested in building a loyal following at twitter, Twitter Tools is a must plugin. You need to download it. Here is the configuration page of the plugin.
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While researching twitter wordpress plugins, I came across another plugin that could be used to boost your twitter followers. The plugin is Tweet&Get it . If you share a file with your visitors, you might consider getting this plugin. You can create download buttons with this plugin and force visitors to retweet your post and follow you at twitter to download the file.
