Although, they were late, but finally, the official Twitter plugin for WordPress is now available in the official WordPress plugin repository. The Twitter plugin for WordPress allows you to quickly enhance your WordPress site with over dozen of Twitter features. Let’s take a brief overview of the brand new plugin, and see what unique features, Twitter plugin has to offer for the WordPress site owners.
Plugin Requirements
Before trying to install the plugin, make sure the PHP version requirement of the plugin is 5.4+ or newer. If you’re running your site on the host with older version of PHP, then I strongly suggest you to ask your host, how you can upgrade your site to use the newer version of PHP.
Still if you try to install the plugin on sites, powered with older version of PHP, then you’re most likely unable to see the plugin settings menu in your WordPress dashboard.
Twitter Plugin for WordPress Overview
Twitter Plugin Settings
Once you install the Twitter plugin, you will see the above settings menu in your WordPress dashboard, right after the settings menu.
Theme and link color customization
The first option is to select the theme color for the embedded tweets depending upon your WordPress theme, you can either select the “light or dark” theme, Blogosense has a light color background, so I had chosen the light one. Under the theme settings, you can also customize the link and the border colors to tailor the embedded tweets to match your site’s content.
The plugin also enables you to easily embed Twitter videos on your site.
Site attribution
Under the, site attribution section, don’t forget to mention your Twitter account username since, the plugin will attribute shared content to your site’s Twitter account.
Embed Tweet buttons
You can also add a Tweet button, to every published post on your site, the plugin can be configured to display a tweet button, before/after the post content or even both. If you also want the plugin to display the total tweet count, check the count box, and if you want your Tweet button to appear bigger in size, keep the large button box checked.
Warnings
An embedded tweet or embedded timeline may display with restricted capabilities when a “Content Security Policy” restricts inline loading of Twitter, I would suggest you to set the “Suppress Content Security Policy warnings” box checked to turn off the functionality that displays the Content Security Policy warnings on your site.
Twitter Custom Text
Sometimes I want a different tweet text, hashtags for my posts other than the actual WordPress post title, now with the”Twitter Custom text” feature I can easily add a custom tweet text, and even define my own custom hashtags for the individual posts. The plugin, adds a post editor meta box under each post on the back-end of your site where, along with the custom Tweet text, hashtags, you can also add custom data for Twitter cards.
Pro Tip – If you’re using WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin, then you can already use the custom Twitter text feature, by switching to the Social Tab, under the “WordPress SEO by Yoast Metabox.” Under the tab can add your custom Twitter title, description, and you can even add a custom image for the Twitter, overriding the default feature image of an individual post.
Twitter Follow Widget
The plugin also comes with a simple Twitter follow widget, just add the title of the widget, mention your Twitter username, check the “Show username?” box if you want to show the username along with the follow button, for eg “Follow @ yourusername.”
You can also show the total no of your Twitter follower count, make the follow button size appear small or large, according to your sidebar.
Site-wide Twitter Cards
Additionally, once you activate and configure the plugin, it will automatically add the Twitter cards, on each and every published post on your site, that enables link previews, site attribution, Twitter analytics, when a user on your site shares your site’s URLs on Twitter.
Ads Conversion Tracking
With the Twitter plugin, you can also easily track the Twitter advertising campaign conversion, or even build a re-marketing audience with the “twitter_tracking” WordPress shortcode. You can use the shortcode inside the post content area or measure the shortcode using the do_shortcode WordPress function to add Twitter ads tracking to your WordPress site.
For example: [twitter_tracking id="12b34"]
Conclusion
Well to be honest, before the arrival of the official Twitter plugin for WordPress, I’ve been already optimizing my sites for Twitter using plugins, such as WordPress SEO by Yoast to add Twitter cards and Custom Twitter meta descriptions, implementing the official Twitter follow button using the native method, and now a days very few people uses the official twitter tweet button. Instead, people prefer to use popular social media plugins, such as Monarch by Elegantthemes (it’s a paid plugin, you can see it live on this site) to add the custom Tweet buttons, along with the other social media buttons. Lastly, it’s totally up to you, whether you want to integrate all the goodness of Twitter, using a single official plugin, which isn’t bad either or keep on using the current way (alike me) to optimize your site for Tweeples.
Over to you now, do you like the new Twitter Plugin for WordPress, are you going to use it on your sites? let me know your thoughts in the comments.
