How To Auto-Tweet WordPress Blog Posts w/ Tweetily

Why should I auto-tweet my WordPress blog posts?

It creates additional exposure for your old blog posts for free on Twitter and so long as you set it up right, you only have to do it once!

Will auto-tweeting annoy my followers?

If you do it too frequently, yes. If you set a reasonable interval between your auto-tweets, unlikely.

How do I start auto-tweeting my WordPress blog posts?

1. Install & activate the free WordPress plugin Tweetily.
2. Connect & authorize your Twitter account to Tweetily.
3. Configure, schedule & activate Tweetily.
4. Follow @flavmartins on Twitter for creating Tweetily for us all to use for free!
5. Gain additional free exposure & referral traffic from Twitter, thanks to Tweetily.

What settings would you recommend I use for Tweetily?

Tweet Content

Post Title Only

Additional Text & Additional Text Location

Only use this if you have something clever and universal to all your tweets to add. If you’re using your personal Twitter account to auto-tweet and you also have a Twitter account for your blog, you might want to add “via @yourblogtwitteraccount” to the “End of the tweet” for example.

Include Link

Yes

#Hashtags

Yes. Use create hashtags from post tagsFor some stupid reason the Tweetily WordPress plugin doesn’t offer an option to create hashtags from both categories & tags. So I customized the plugin to accommodate this feature and if you’d like this feature, you can follow my steps to do this further down in this blog post.

Time between tweets

I would recommend 4 hours or more

Random Time Added

I would recommend 4 hours or less. I went with 0.116 to add a 7 minute auto-tweet offset

Minimum age of post

Maximum age of post

Enable Logging

Yes, save a log of actions in log file.

Activate it, why not.

Number of Tweets

1, definitely keep it at 1.

If you want more tweets, more often, just adjust the timing rather than the quantity here.

Select post type

Only PostsSince there’s no filtering options for pages, I wouldn’t recommend including them. You don’t want your Privacy Policy page being tweeted!

Exclude Categories

Exclude whatever post categories it makes sense to exclude on your website.

How can I get Tweetily to use hashtags for both my post categories & tags?

1. Download the top-core.php file from your WordPress plugins folder via FTP in this directory: /wp-content/plugins/tweetily-tweet-wordpress-posts-automatically/
2. Open the top-core.php file in a text editor (my favorite is Sublime Text 2, but any shitty text editor will do)
3. Make the following changes to the code in the top-core.php file:

   $post_tags = get_the_tags($post->ID);

   $post_tags = get_the_tags($post->ID);
   $post_categories = get_the_category($post->ID);
   $post_tags = array_merge($post_tags, $post_categories);

4. Save the top-core.php file and overwrite the same file on your web server via FTP in this directory: /wp-content/plugins/tweetily-tweet-wordpress-posts-automatically/
5. Now when you set the Tweetily #Hashtags option to “Yes. Use create hashtags from post tags” it will now tweet hashtags using both your post categories & tags, instead of just your post tags!

What else can I do to further market my content on Twitter?

Check out my friend’s Alex new post on how to Automatically Replicate Your Own Tweets. His post walks you through how you can leverage Buffer & IFTTT to take your Twitter content marketing automation efforts to the next level.