Twitter Tools For Bloggers

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 4:02 pm

This is the second part of a series on Twitter and blogging. The first part talked about using Twitter and using it for building relationships.

Today I will discuss some of the tools I have found to improve your use of Twitter in relation to your blog and a couple that have been helpful for using Twitter.

First to integrate your Twitter feed on to your blog there area couple items you can use. Tweet My Blog will allow you to easily add your latest tweets to your sidebar. It will also send your latest blog post out as a tweet to your Twitter account.

A similar plugin with a few more features is Twitter Tools,. This will also allow you to use your tweets as blog posts. Either of these will allow you to automate the process and send tweets when you blog along with showing your tweets on your blog.

There is another tool that will allow you to auto post your blog posts to Twitter called Twitter Feed which will monitor your blog’s RSS feed and post to Twitter when it finds new information on a regularly scheduled basis. It also works with other services like identica.ca or Ping.fm.

There are a couple tools that will help you monitor and stay active with Twitter. The two that I have tried are Twhirl and TweetDeck. I am back using Twhirl as I have had trouble since the last Windows update with TweetDeck and my machine.

I really loved some of the utility of TweetDeck and thought it was easier to use but Twhirl will work until I have the time to find what is causing the problem.

Another plugin that allows you to add a place in your comments for people to leave their Twitter username called WP Twitip ID. This way you can find the people who are commenting on your blog and be able to strengthen the relationship through Twitter conversations too.

If you have other tools you have used and like feel free to leave a comment.

Mike Paetzold