Seagyn Davis
Scheduling WordPress Post Tweets with WordTwit

Scheduling WordPress Post Tweets with WordTwit

Reading time of post 1 min readDate when post was published24 September 2013
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I was doing a bit of research on the best times to tweet links to my posts and when the tweet would get the most views. There are a few times during the day when you can hit the sweet spot of user activity on Twitter but naturally 7am in South Africa is quite a few hours away from 7am in say the States or Australia.

So if I wanted to get the best reach across the globe I would have to publish a tweet at multiple times a day. Now some purists would say I should do this manually but I'm all for efficiency so I went out and looked for a plugin that would send a tweet out every few hours with every post I published.

The first bunch of suggestions I found were for old school RSS reading web apps that would tweet every time something came into the RSS feed which you could also set a schedule for. Great, if RSS was: a) Reliable especially with something like Feedburner and b) Still cool to use - it's not anymore!

Also with Twitter having such a great API I figured "surely there must be a tool out there that can do it for you".

This is where WordTwit comes into play.

I must admit that when I first found it, it was being redeveloped from the ground up by BraveNewCode Inc. (the same guys who brought us WPtouch - geniuses in other words). This was quite frustrating, finding a perfect solution that wasn't working yet, but the guys reassured us that something new was on the way.

Alas, it arrived and WordTwit (packed with WordTwit Pro features for free now) was available and is working great. You may have even arrived here from one of the schedules tweets.

Some nifty features are:

  • URL shortening with a shortener of your choice
  • Customisation of the tweet layout incl. hashtags
  • Per-post editing feature
  • Schedule how many repeats it will tweet and the time in between
  • Multiple accounts that you can set a time difference between so you don't have the same tweet on 10 different accounts going off at the same time.

Just a note when you're setting up WordTwit. I had issues trying to add an account after updating the settings. The solution was quite simple, you need to set the Callback URL when creating the Twitter app to the domain of your website. I doubt WordTwit uses it but Twitter determines the abilities of its apps by that value.

It's a great tool although you might have heard of a better one. Let me know if you have :)

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