Why should you post link notices to your Twitter account?
Everybody has different reasons for starting a blog site (personal, corporate, or industry related), but they all have one thing in common – they want to increase their readership. One way to do so is to give your readers different ways to discover your blog and get¬†alerts when you post new articles.¬† Besides the obvious FeedBurner, RSS¬†integrations, you might want to think about creating auto-generated twitter links.¬† Whenever you post a new article to your blog, a new “tweet” will be created and will alert all of your followers. Not only will it alert your current followers, it will set off an entire series of “pings” which will trickle down to different social networks and feed monitoring services so that more and more readers will discover your amazing blog!
Why auto-post?
As with most marketing campaigns, having consistent sustainable processes is a valuable part of creating a successful campaign.  Just planing to update your Twitter account every time you post a new article is not enough.  No matter how diligent you or your marketing team is, eventually it is going to slip.  The key is to automate the process.
How-to sync your Twitter account to a WordPress powered blog
Luckily Alex King has developed a WordPress plugin that creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It can automatically pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts from within WordPress.
Install the plugin like you would any normal WordPres Plugin- Login to the admin section of your WordPress site and click the “plugin” section.
- Click the “activate” button and then select the “Configure your settings here” option.
- Add your Twitter Username and Password and then test to make sure that it is correct.
- Select “Yes” from the Create a tweet when you post in your blog option.
- If you are also interested in having your tweets post in the sidebar of your WordPress blog, then set the rest of the options before clicking the “Update Twitter Tools Options” button near the bottom of the page.¬† You’re done!
How-to sync your Twitter account to a TypePad powered blog
Unfortunately nobody has developed a widget for TypePad to do the integration for you.¬† I have contacted TypePad directly about it and their response was “Yeah, that is something that we are working on for some future release at some time in the future.” So, while we are holding our breath I have an alternative recommended by a fellow Twitter user(MDY)
Go to TwitterFeed (not associated with Twitter) and login using your OpenID login (OpenID is a standard for providing single sign on between web sites. You probably already have an OpenID account and don’t even know it.)- Provide the URL for your blog’s RSS feed and how often they should look for post to twitter.
- Additionally¬† you can create a prefix for my auto-generated blog tweets.¬† So add something like New Article: in the “Prefix each tweet with:” field.
Their server will check your blog’s feed at the specified interval and post any new items to your twitter account. You just sit back and relax!¬† Just a cautionary notice, they do post this disclaimer on their site : “This service is provided on an as-is-and-as-available basis”¬† which sounds like “this service is unreliable” but my experience has been great so far. I have a feeling that this is just a way to protect themselves from any kind of liable suits that someone may try to bring against them.
If someone ever releases a Typepad Twitter widget, I will make sure to update this article.  Also, if you know of any other RSS to Twitter services or if you found this article helpful, let me know. You can also follow me on Twitter!