Let’s start with what Twitter actually is. The name comes from the English word “tweet,” meaning “chirp,” which explains the bird logo. As stated in the title and description of the service itself, it’s an online platform for microblogging, allowing users to exchange short messages and follow other blogs in a single feed.
Twitter is a quite popular service, and this is important for us to consider!
Explaining the benefits of Twitter would take a while, but in short, it’s a great source for obtaining additional external links to your site. Similar to an RSS feed, you can share links to your latest posts, which search engines can then find.
However, there’s a catch—since it’s a microblogging platform, there’s a 140-character limit, and sometimes even the link alone might not fit, let alone a description. Fortunately, there are many services for shortening URLs, and even better, from version 3.0.*, WordPress can generate short links itself.
In general, it works well: you publish a post on your site, get a short link, and “announce” it on your Twitter. But this is convenient if you are an active microblogger. What if you need Twitter only for promotional purposes? In that case, everything can be automated—enter cross-posting.
You can cross-post your entries to Twitter via the Rss2Twitter service. You can find more about it by searching online; it requires some registration and clicking extra buttons, but it’s not my preferred method. I prefer to avoid intermediaries, and here FeedBurner will come in handy. In the previous post, I mentioned how to link our WordPress to FeedBurner. Now, we can link FeedBurner to Twitter. It’s quite simple.
First, go to your FeedBurner account and access the RSS feed settings. There’s a tab called “Publicize,” and under this tab, there’s a section called “Socialize.” Click on it. Then, click on “Add a Twitter account,” and you’ll be directed to authorize and confirm it. After authorization, you return to FeedBurner and set up how your posts will appear on Twitter. The settings are straightforward.
After configuring everything, click “Activate,” and voila! As soon as your post is published in FeedBurner, it will be automatically sent to Twitter.