Every day it seems like there is a new development on the Internet - a new site, a new tool and a new buzzword. However, services like WordPress and Twitter have established themselves as the leading players in this new world of social media. While both services are designed to help you communicate information, they take a very different approach to that communication. For that reason, when you put them together there is little overlap and great benefit from their combined forces.

WordPress is used to manage your blog and possibly even your entire web site. It allows you to communicate a ton of valuable information - but your customers, potential customers and/or visitors have to remember to come to your site. You can post and publish awesome information - but there is only value if you get visitors. There is an option called really simple syndication (RSS) that allows for a push of your information to readers but RSS tens to appeal to the more technical audience and the use of RSS is tiny compared to the social media sites like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.

Twitter is a free service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. It is known as a micro-blogging service because the content is limited to text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known asfollowers). As a sender you can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or allow anybody to access them. Twitter can a communicate quickly and in real time to many customers, potential customers and/or visitors - but Twitter can only send a small amount of content.

So essentially WordPress has all this great content that you want to share and Twitter has the ability to send short messages about that content. Take a look at these specific applications to get an even better feel for this great teaming of applications:

Use your Twitter account to announce your new WordPress posts
Twitterfeed is a great example of WordPress and Twitter working together. You setup your Twitterfeed account and you tell them the location of your WordPress blog. You also specify how often Twitterfeed should check you blog for updates. Then, at the specified times, Twitterfeed’s servers for new posts and tweets the news about blog updates to your twitter account. Or consider a tool like the Twitter Updater, a WordPress plugin that does the updates in real time as you add new or edit existing blog posts.

Have your visitors use their Twitter accounts to tell even more people about your posts
Promote your blog by using the tweetmeme button, a simple and easy way you can integrate twitter into your WordPress blog. Any of your visitors who have a Twitter account can just click on the link and boom a shorten URL is created (hey - you only have 140 characters) and they are instantly tweeting all their followers about the cool blog post they just read.

Show your WordPress visitors what you are up to using Twitter
You may not have posted a blog that day or even that week, but you can display your tweets right on your WordPress blog with a tool like Twitt-Twoo or Twitter for WordPress. Your blog visitors can see what you are up to and even decide to follow you on Twitter. With some of these tools you get the added benefit of being able to update your twitter account from your WordPress page.

For each plugin or service mentioned here, we could list dozens more just like them. Indeed there are more Twitter-WordPress tools popping up than anybody can keep up with. So focus on the ideas (bold text) of what you can do and then if you don’t like one of the specific applications we’ve mentioned you can easily search for other similar plugins or services.
Blogging and micro-blogging combined will give you even maximum communication power for blog or business!

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