Yesterday, I showed you how to install a plugin. The plugin that I showed you in the video is called Twitter Tools. Today, I want to tell you a bit more about this great plugin. I will let you know what you can do with Twitter Tools and what you need to do to finish the installation.

Let’s start with the rest of the installation. Remember, if you missed the first part of the installation, you can see it here: http://eassistantww.com/install-wordpress-plugin/.

Once you finished the basic installation, you will need to set the plugin up. Let me walk you through the set up step-by-step:

1. You need to register to develop a Twitter app. Just click on the link that Twitter Tools provides. You will be forwarded to the page to develop a Twitter app. Sign in with your Twitter login.

Twitter Tools tells you mostly how to fill it out. In the “Name” section put @yourTwitterusername. Once everything is filled out, you will get a consumer key and a consumer secret that you fill out in Twitter Tools. In the page where you develop a Twitter app, you can also create an access token. Once you have created the access token, you fill out that field and the access token secret (you get that automatically) in Twitter Tools. Now the registration is finished.

2. Now, go back to your list of installed plugins and you will see that you have Twitter Tools, Twitter Tools Bit.ly URL s and Twitter Tools Hashtags installed. Activate the bit.ly URLs and the Hashtags if you want to use them.

3. Go back into settings > Twitter Tools. It is time to set up your Twitter Tools options. Fill everything out like you want it. For myself, I did not want to post my tweets as a blog post, so I set the slider “create a blog post from each of your tweets” to no. In the settings, you can also set up a default hashtag for your blog post tweets.

4. If you want to add a Twitter widget to your sidebar, go to appearance > widgets and drag the Twitter Tools widget to the sidebar.

 

Now, let’s talk about what you can do with Twitter Tools. For me, the main purpose for Twitter Tools is that it makes it very easy to tweet my blog posts. Once it is installed and set up, it will tweet your blog posts with a link out automatically. You can decide which hash tags you want to use for your tweets as well. If you have a bit.ly account, you can use the URL shortener to shorten the link to your blog post. Twitter Tools gives you the option to fully use the bit.ly URL shortener so you can get the analytics for your links. The hash tags and the bit.ly URL shortener is set up after the installation and you don’t need to change it every time you post to your blog. You can change the hash tags any time you want to.

I was using a 3rd party app before to automatically post my blog posts and it worked fine, but I couldn’t use my bit.ly account and I was missing out on the statistics. Also, I wasn’t able to use hash tags automatically.
An additional benefit of Twitter Tools is that it archives your Twitter tweets automatically.

If you want to, Twitter Tools will also create a blog post from your tweets or a daily or weekly digest post from your tweets automatically.

Another benefit is that you can tweet from the sidebar of your blog and from the WordPress admin dashboard.

TwitterTools has a widget that you drag to your sidebar in order to display your latest tweets in your blog.

You can see why this is such a great tool to connect Twitter and WordPress!

Let me know if you tried it out and how it is working for you in the comments.