Twitter plugins are essential if you find yourself using Twitter a lot. Let’s face it I use Twitter, many bloggers use Twitter, and a lot of web designers and small businesses use it. Integrating Twitter on your WordPress site is generally pretty easy. I am compiling a list of the Twitter plugins that I have found and have experience working with. They are in no specific order and I will provide a little about their functionalities.
WP To Twitter
WP To Twitter is a very basic, but useful Twitter WordPress Plugin. The functionality of this plugin is to post your WordPress post to your Twitter. That means that right when you publish your post on your WordPress site it automatically gets tweeted out. You can configure the Twitter account that the message goes out to. Twitter does have a limited amount of characters that you can use, which is 140. WP To Twitter will use one of four URL shorteners YOURLS, Goo.gl, Bit.ly, or Su.pr to shorten you URLS.
You can use post tags as Twitter hashtags. This Twitter plugin does come with Google Analytics to make tracking your Twitter traffic a breeze. This plugin does also support XMLRPC remote clients. You can display your (or another accounts) recent tweets in a widget. Also, you customize your widget to display tweets from keyword searches or hashtags. This is a completely free plugin. There is a paid version that you can buy if you want more control over this simple but powerful WordPress plugin.
WordPress Twitter Bootstrap CSS
A bootstrap plugin is a plugin that is designed with Javascript and CSS to make changes to your plugin with lots of different customization. Meaning it gives you a lot of flexibility on what you can do with your plugin. This plugin “Wordpress Twitter Bootstrap CSS” is a plugin that works with any theme for WordPress. You don’t need any programming knowledge, comes with built in LESS compeller, uses shortcodes, custom CSS reset files, etc.
Customizing your Twitter on your WordPress site is very easy to use with this plugin. You can easily switch from Twitter Bootstrap CSS, Twitter Bootstrap CSS Legacy. Yahoo UI Reset CSS, and Normalize CSS. This plugin is 100% free and a must have if you use Twitter on your website.
Twitter Button
Yes, that’s it name “Twitter Button”, short and sweet. This is a very simple Twitter plugin that works with latest versions of WordPress. There are 4 very simple features; add a twitter follow button, add a Twitter-like button, configure display position (either top or bottom), use a standard button with the number of followers, and you can even replace it with a custom image.
This plugin is 100% free, but there is a paid option for $20.38 per year. the paid version allows you to exclude pages/post from your Twitter button and you get support within one business day. Not a bad option for those Twitter power users that love to integrate Twitter on their WordPress sites.
JM Twitter Cards
Twitter cards are summaries linked to URL displaying on your Twitter timeline. You can put a picture with minimal description about the content of the URL. Easily, it makes viewing experience nicer and more enjoyable. To include this on your website is a little bit difficult; however, using the JM Twitter Cards plugin, it manages to handle this work easily.
To be able to setup the Twitter cards, you should include metadata parameters to your HTML. If you can’t understand it, don’t feel frustrated because JM Twitter Cards will do it automatically. It is accomplished by using your data posts and pages like the featured image, SEO title and excerpts. After installing this plugin, Twitter cards will start doing the job when linked on Twitter allowing people to see the summary of your posts.
Also, JM Twitter Cards plugin supports your product cards, gallery cards and photo cards which can be used for multiple types of content. Twitter cards are customizable on a post-by-post basis. Optionally, it can use the default settings to generate Twitter Cards automatically for pages and posts.
Feed Them Social
This is a really cool Twitter plugin that allows you to add your own social feeds to any post, page or sidebar. You can generate a shortcode and place it anywhere you want it. You can specify the number of Tweets to display and Twitter name. Then you click generate shortcode and you can place it wherever you want to on your WordPress site. This plugin is completely free to use, but there are extra extensions you can use for a yearly licensing fee. This plugin isn’t just a Twitter plugin; it also works with Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Revive Old Post (Former Tweet Old Post)
Revive Old Post (Former Tweet Old Post) is a plugin that shares your previous posts on social media. And because of that, you get more hits for those posts and continue to be alive.
Here’s how this plugin works. Revive Old Post helps in maintaining posts in the past by sharing them, aimed at generating more traffic from social media. At the same time, it helps in promoting your content. The number of post and the amount of time to use can be set easily.
There are additional features included in Revive Old Post plugin such as:
- Hashtags to highlight some topics
- exclude categories
- exclude particular posts
- incorporate backlinks to the main site
Take advantage of the social networks like Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter to provide new followers using your previous content. Revive Old Post guides your users to be engaged in social media activities, establish a strong following and ultimately lead them to your main site.
Twitter Auto Publish
When it comes to a simple WP plugin, Twitter Auto Publish allows the user to automatically publish posts—from a blog site to Twitter account. It’s helpful in saving time from the hands-on task of copying blogs and publishing them to Twitter. This plugin supports multiple posting options like simple text messages including those texts with images.
The format for customizable message uses various data from the blog such as post description, post title, excerpt, blog title and permalink. If you want to filter your content before publishing to social media, Twitter Auto Publish supports diverse filtering options per type and category. Optionally, you can activate or deactivate publishing of fresh pages made in your blog.
The user can configure the auto publishing to different accounts in similar social media site with the premium version. For every account, different formats can be configured before publishing the message. Furthermore, you can control the rate of publishing to social media through the auto publish activity. Free version provides instant publishing, while the premium version is configured for posts to be published or by using interval time.
Recent Tweets Widget
On Twitter, you will not have the rate limited when you use the Recent Tweets Widget plugin for the new Twitter API v1.1 with Cache.
This current version of Recent Tweets Widget plugin uses and stores your tweets in cache. In means, it will read the message status of your database without inquiring Twitter.com for each page load. With this, your rate is not limited. There is a setting to use where you can set the desired frequency for your cache to be updated.
This is a plain and simple feed widget. Simply install this plugin and include the widget in your sidebar. Then add data in “Settings -> tweet widget setting.” Afterwards, this plugin can now work. Since the feed display structure is not complicated, add CSS as desired. No worries, after all, because this is the right plugin to support Twitter API v1.1.
Rotating Tweets
Rotating Tweets is a Twitter widget and a shortcode that supports v1.1 of the Twitter API. Because it is space-efficient, it doesn’t display all your tweets once but shows them one at a time. Afterward, it replaces the tweet gradually with the next one. Once all tweets are shown, the display loops back to create another round or rotation.
Even though the Twitter website is down, Rotating Tweets widget is very reliable to keep on showing the current tweets. This widget is customizable so you can show people’s tweets, the number of tweets you want to display, replies and re-tweets and whether you want to show the “follow” button or not. Optionally, you can decide how fast you want the tweets to rotate and the kind of animation you will use.
For more efficiency and up-to-date tweets, this widget caches the latest data to prevent issues on rate limiting. And for your tweets to generate quality, smooth results, Rotating Tweets uses jQuery, jQuery.Cycle2 and jQuery.Cycle.
Random Tweet Widget
If you want to show tweets randomly from your social media account in the sidebar section, include the Random Tweet Widget. Random Tweet Widget is the suitable plugin if you want to post some tweets randomly on your site from the Twitter account.
Similar to other Twitter widgets, this plugin relies mainly on Twitter API version 1.1. You are required to make your own personal Twitter Application from https://dev.twitter.com/. Twitter will give two strings within the Twitter Application: Consumer Secret and Consumer Key. Furthermore, you still need two more strings: Access Token and Access Token Secret. To finish the process, enter all Authorization strings into the widget options box, together with your display settings. From that, your Twitter Widget is already activated and ready to work.
You also need to enable the CURL and OPENSSL extensions in your PHP environment. Similar Authorization strings can be used for multiple widgets and websites. Just don’t forget to have them safely stored.
Official Twitter Widget
Embed multiple tweets, single tweets, a Vine or a Moment to your WordPress site by installing the Official Twitter Plugin. It helps reach your blog content through the Tweet button. It helps use automatically the link previews on Twitter using the Twitter card markup. Your target audience can get your current updates through the Periscope “on-air button” and the Twitter “follow button.”
With the available WordPress API’s, great features are built-in, making it stress-free to build your site’s pages and admin features. Getting this is easy with WordPress extensibility feature. You can customize it by using WordPress REST API and shortcode customizations. This plugin requires the PHP 5.4 version or higher.
Automatically, this plugin customizes the embed HTML designed to match your website and enqueues Twitter widget’s JavaScript to obtain more speed in loading. It can handle cases like article loading via WordPress API. Embedding tweets can be done by putting the URL in your content.
Twitter Tweets
With the integrated “Follow” button, Twitter Tweets plugin displays your current tweets seen on your WordPress website or blog. Through this Twitter Tweets plugin, you can customize the widget and use auto-expand tweet images, custom height, custom URL link color, on/off tweets replay and more.
Some of the useful features of Twitter Tweets include:
- Twitter tweets widget
- Widget title
- Customization settings
- Height setting
- Submit tweet live on your blog
- Theme widget option
- Tweet links to color option
- Add the “Follow” button
- Hide and show tweet replies
- Auto-expand tweet photos
- Re-tweet and choose favorite tweets
Do you know of any other Twitter WordPress plugins that are free or paid that need to be added to this list? Please leave your comments down below.
Great write up. I read somewhere about twitter cards. I really wish I would have bookmarked that page as I cannot find it again. Do you know a good plugin for twitter cards?
Yes, JM Twitter Cards. I will be updating my list of Twitter plugins. Please stay tuned 🙂
Thank you
I’ve got another one to add on the list.
TweetDis, I like it a lot!
I can’t remember where, but I read of it as “Click to Tweet on steroids” 🙂
I”m using twitter cards through my Yoast SEO, however when I post I have a link and a view summary button that people have to click to see my pictures. I want the pictures to be auto populated without the need for a click. How do I make that happen?
Here is a good guide I found on Twitter Cards.
https://blog.bufferapp.com/twitter-cards-guide
Hope it helps.