Last week, the micro-blogging site Twitter announced the launch of its first official WordPress plug-in. The brand new plug-in is a great effort by the Twitter development team to wrap up several features and functionalities, which were previously available through third-party plug-ins, in a single installable package. Believe it or not, it has received 1500+ downloads within a few hours of the release.
Available globally for free in 28 languages, the official Twitter plug-in helps WordPress-powered sites easily embed Twitter content and dramatically grow their Twitter audience. It is indeed developed to “optimize a WordPress site for Twitter” through deep integration of Twitter features like sharing buttons, Twitter cards, tweet and follow button, etc. with WordPress APIs.
Here is what does Twitter’s Official WordPress Plug-in offer out of the box
Customized Embedded Tweet
The new Twitter plug-in lets you add an embedded tweet to your WordPress site without any hassle. Right from your WordPress admin dashboard, you can easily customize the look of the embedded tweet to match your site’s theme. There are two widget themes, light and dark, available to choose from. Even, you’re allowed to customize color schemes of border surrounding and link text inside a Twitter widget.
Support for Video Embeds
Supporting video embeds, this new plug-in gives you the ability to highlight your best Twitter video content. You can showcase your top Twitter videos on your website in a video-optimized Tweet display. One of the best things about this plug-in is automatically adding a new Twitter feature to itself. Twitter recently added the ability to directly upload 30 seconds videos to its network and you can see, the Twitter plug-in already supports video embeds.
Automatic Generation of Twitter Cards
While the new official Twitter plug-in is installed on your WordPress site, it automatically builds Twitter Cards for your web pages, which are a great way to attach a rich media experience to your Tweets. This means, you now don’t have to worry about the generation of Twitter cards while you’re sharing your website’s content on Twitter. This plug-in automatically adds link previews to embedded Twitter cards.
Track Content’s Popularity on Twitter
The most interesting part of this plug-in is Twitter Analytics through which you would be able to judge the performance of your website’s content shared on Twitter. Once installed, this plug-in allows you to associate your site and author your Twitter account. This way, you can easily track how many impressions your content is getting when tweeted and who are the top distributors of your content on Twitter. Remember, performance tracking plays a vital role in growing your audience on any social media platform and this plug-in plays well with content tracking.
Twitter Ads Conversion Tracking
The new plug-in comes with all essential tools using which Twitter advertisers can easily track ad conversions if they’re running a Twitter Ad campaign. Advertisers would have the ability to measure their ROI (return on investment) by tracking actions users take after viewing or interacting with Twitter ads. In addition, this powerful plug-in also simplifies building a custom targeting audience with WordPress macros.
Lets You Add Tweet & Follow Buttons
By allowing you to add a Tweet button to your site’s content, this plug-in makes content sharing on Twitter an absolutely breeze. The Tweet Button is automatically configured to include post URL, custom share text, site, and author Twitter accounts and post-specific hashtags. Moreover, right from your WordPress dashboard, you can put a Follow button on every page of your site in order to turn your casual visitors into loyal followers.
Plug-ins With Which Twitter Plug-in Would Likely Conflict
While you’re going to install the new Twitter plug-in, you should consider other social plugins that offer similar functionality. Below are some plugins which I think could conflict with this new plug-in:
- Click to Tweet
- Social Warfare
- JM Twitter Cards
- WordPress SEO by Yoast
If you found that the new Twitter official plug-in is conflicting with any of the above or any other social plug-in, make sure to disable that functionality/plug-in for a better experience. My suggestion is to disable all social plug-ins while getting your hands on this new plug-in.
Plug-in Requirements & Availability
This plug-in requires PHP v5.4 or later and is available on both WordPress.org and GitHub.
Excellent Stuff Matey, thank you Ajeet for sharing this with us. Keep up the good work. I am sure I will speak with you again soon. Mark