3 New Ways to Attract More Twitter Followers from WordPress.com
We love to create new features on WordPress.com, but we also like to make it easier for you to connect your site with other popular services. We’ve teamed up with the folks at Twitter several times over the years, and we’re thrilled to help them unveil the new Follow Button to the world for the very first time today.
The new Follow Button makes it easy for your readers to follow you on Twitter without ever leaving your WordPress.com site. Here are three ways to incorporate it on your site:
1. Add the new Follow Button to posts, pages, or text widgets. You can even show a count of your followers, customize the colors, and display a link to your Twitter page. Check out the Twitter Follow Button support document for all the details.
Here’s a working example of what the new Follow Button looks like:
2. Embed fully functioning Tweets on your posts and pages with Twitter Blackbird Pie. The new Follow Button will appear in the upper right hand corner of the Tweet.
3 New Ways to Attract More Twitter Followers from WordPress.com http://wp.me/pf2B5-1QT—
WordPress.com (@wordpressdotcom) May 31, 2011
3. Activate the Twitter Widget on your site’s sidebar to display the Follow Button below a list of recent Tweets.
We hope the new Follow Button will help you to boost your site’s reach and exposure. Don’t forget that there are additional ways that you can integrate Twitter with WordPress.com:
- Add a Twitter sharing button to the bottom of your posts or pages with the Sharing feature
- Tweet new posts automatically to your Twitter account with Publicize
May 31st at 8:34 pm
Ooo. I like the tweet embedding. I use tweets in my posts about social media a lot. Cool frickin’ beans!
May 31st at 8:35 pm
Pretty cool, WP!
May 31st at 8:38 pm
Wow! This is great.
I’m gonna try it out and hope it’ll work!
Thanks for this nice feature!
Twitter tweets “twank” you
May 31st at 8:44 pm
Awesome! Is there any way for us to use our own custom image for the twitter button?
May 31st at 8:47 pm
There is not a way to use a custom image.
May 31st at 8:50 pm
Wow. I love this newest addition. Simple to implement, easy for vistors to use. You guys rock!!
May 31st at 9:03 pm
Thanks for the tips! I love learning these new gadgets…
May 31st at 9:07 pm
I LOVE social media integration. I really like this new addition. Perhaps Facebook and LinkedIn integration next?
May 31st at 9:14 pm
Too bad i don’t tweet.
May 31st at 9:33 pm
w00t! That is REALLY useful!
Now I can finally, uh, well, post the clever things I tweet on my blog. YEAH.
May 31st at 9:52 pm
You people on WordPress.com are absolutely fantastic! I moved my blog from Microsoft Spaces, and have never fully understood what some features are about.
But today, I’ve been on here awhile checking FAQ and other documentation. I’m still trying to understand a full explanation to Read-o-matic.
May 31st at 9:54 pm
Now I’m gonna start tweeting!
May 31st at 10:25 pm
Cool cool cool. I’ll try this. It would be useful i think. B-) i like twitting!
May 31st at 10:41 pm
Wow…. I love this feature. The button appears automatically. I just realized it.
Thanks, keep up the good works
May 31st at 10:42 pm
Brilliant! Now I can get rid of my workaround. Thank you!
May 31st at 10:52 pm
Bring on the hits!
May 31st at 10:55 pm
Is there something similar for Facebook?
May 31st at 11:05 pm
Not at this time.
May 31st at 11:15 pm
Good going guys. Like it alot. There is just one “but”: the “display follow button” tick doesn’t actually do anything. Follow button is always displayed.
May 31st at 11:45 pm
Whoops. Fixed now.
May 31st at 11:42 pm
Very nice new feature and easy to use. Thanks.
Jun 1st at 12:06 am
This is really nice. Too bad my tweets are so dead boring; so dull in fact, I discourage my readers from following me. Have you got a button for that?!!
Jun 1st at 12:20 am
What about facebook intergration?
Jun 1st at 12:30 am
What type of integration would you like to see?
Jun 1st at 1:30 am
Very cool. I shall put this to use next time I give the blog a good going over.
Jun 1st at 1:57 am
Cool and very useful. Yet another move in the right direction. Thanks guys
Jun 1st at 2:37 am
Wohoo! I like it. Well, I often connect my blog to Twitter. Now, I can replac the words i used before ‘you can follow me on Twitter’ with a simple button ‘follow’.
Jun 1st at 2:49 am
Thanks WordPress! I’m glad you’re making more integrations with Twitter than Facebook. I love the former than the latter.
Jun 1st at 2:52 am
Very cool…will have to explore this further.
Jun 1st at 3:22 am
Like it! I’m going to add this one.
Jun 1st at 3:35 am
Nice new widget! But it would have been nice to have everything in one widget, twitter follow button with and without tweets. Thanks.
Jun 1st at 4:34 am
If you don’t want to display your Tweets in the sidebar you can use the Twitter Follow Button in a text widget.
Jun 1st at 4:10 am
Neato! I don’t have twitter – yet – but when I do get twitter I’ll sync it first thing. They say writers are supposed to have a good handle on social media, after all.
Jun 1st at 4:19 am
More good news from the WP. Congratulations!
Jun 1st at 5:01 am
You might think about adding the same feature to comments beneath our posts. For example, I write articles (or posts) periodically, and then update them with continuing comments, as well as the comments of others. I would like the comments to be “tweeted” too, but this is not possible now.
Thanks so much.
Jun 1st at 5:02 am
Thanks!! Will be sure to explore this further..
Jun 1st at 5:11 am
Looks great! Will this work on WordPress.org too? I’m new to Twitter and love the integration ideas.
Jun 1st at 6:38 pm
Not yet. We’ll release it in Jetpack.
Jun 1st at 5:30 am
Very informative…thanks!
Jun 1st at 5:32 am
Looking forward when you guys will work out a cooler more modern version for our non self hosted WordPress blogs. Meanwhile I’m thankful for this simple one too.
Jun 1st at 6:37 pm
This feature is for WordPress.com, not self-hosted yet.
Jun 1st at 6:03 am
Sounds very cool! No Twitter here yet either. Another reason to figure out what the heck it’s all about.
Jun 1st at 6:43 am
Once again, many thanks for the great initiative and for anticipating what might be useful for WP users.
Jun 1st at 7:21 am
Awesome. The power of WP and Twitter. Marvellous!
Jun 1st at 8:31 am
Thanks, the Twitter Blackbird Pie is really great – and so easy to add! Compliments!
Jun 1st at 9:11 am
Good job! I am going to use this feature. Thank you.
Jun 1st at 10:46 am
Hi Nick!
I love the minimal look of the Twitter Follow Button that I used it on a Text Widget on my sidebar. For aesthetic purposes, I’m trying to center align the button, but to no avail. Could you suggest a shortcode command for this?
Thanks very much, WP!
Cheers!
Jun 1st at 12:51 pm
Sorry, there is not a way to center at this time.
Jun 1st at 12:06 pm
Do real men “twitter”? No wonder this country is in the bad shape that it is in, with all the “tweets” from the “twitterers. It’s enough to get a “real man” sick.
Jun 1st at 12:21 pm
I’ve used it. That’s Great!
Jun 1st at 1:07 pm
Awesome! Many Many Thanks for this. Also consider an option of adding my Twitter name, when someone share my post on Twitter via tweet button.
Jun 1st at 1:28 pm
Funny to see this. i just added the Twitter plugin some days ago. It’s fantastic!!
Jun 1st at 1:34 pm
Awesome! Gonna give it a shot right now on my nyc photo blog.
Jun 1st at 1:41 pm
Nice – I do notice that intermittently Twitter.com doesn’t respond, so when my blog comes up there is an error: “Error: Twitter did not respond. Please wait a few minutes and refresh this page.” Is that just a traffic issue, or technical glitch, or ???
Jun 1st at 6:35 pm
You should rarely ever see this on a WordPress.com blog because of caching. Please contact support if you run into problems.
Jun 1st at 1:54 pm
WordPress.com is getting awesome day by day..
Jun 1st at 2:34 pm
I’d been doing Blackbird Pie the old-fashioned manual way. This is great and I can’t wait to try it. Thanks!
Jun 1st at 2:48 pm
This is great! Any chance this feature will be added to the Jetpack plugin?
Jun 1st at 6:33 pm
Yes, it will eventually be added to Jetpack.
Jun 1st at 3:27 pm
AWESOME! Quick question…
When are you going to allow us to edit when you can tweet at a post from the bottom button and have it tag us in post when people share, and then have the option to follow after pressing tweet when sharing. I hope that makes sense…
Jun 1st at 6:34 pm
We have options for that. Check out http://en.support.wordpress.com/sharing/
Jun 1st at 4:11 pm
Excellent. I did it in 2 minutes and it’s working smoothly. Nice!
Jun 1st at 4:22 pm
Wonderful! Going to add it right now! Thanks!
Jun 1st at 4:31 pm
Just recently started tweeting, though my blog is well established…looks like it’s about time to become a bit more Twitter-centric.
Thank you for this cool integration!
Jun 1st at 5:28 pm
Maybe a status message display from the Facebook profile for those who would like to have it.
Jun 1st at 6:00 pm
Thanks alot Nick , I did it
I wanna ask about something plz , how can I put the share button beside every post ?
such a button that enable anyone to share the post on his profile anywhere!!
Jun 1st at 6:31 pm
Check out http://en.support.wordpress.com/sharing/
Jun 1st at 6:03 pm
Any plans to include the new Google +1 button announced today (6/1)?
Jun 1st at 6:30 pm
Nothing to announce at this time.
Jun 1st at 7:19 pm
Thanks alot Nick
Jun 1st at 8:09 pm
I’m grateful for this widget as well and have been noticing the same error code as mentioned above. Will see if it continues to happen. . .
Looking forward to being able to use custom Twitter images at some point on WP.
Jun 1st at 8:26 pm
I gotta try this out. Thanks!
Jun 1st at 8:54 pm
Will be trying that right now–even if it takes me hours to understand how to do it! Thanks a mil!
Jun 1st at 8:57 pm
Twitter widget is really help me to promote my blog.
Jun 1st at 9:56 pm
This has been helpful! We will definitely be using it.
Jun 1st at 10:42 pm
Sweet. Would love to have a live follow button for facebook as well.
Jun 1st at 10:46 pm
Thanks! This post is awesome!
Jun 2nd at 12:02 am
Why is everybody obsessed with gaining more traffic and followers?
WordPress: Great service, but it’s been a while since I’ve posted and I’ve noticed a shift away from actual blogging and more toward self-promotion. The stats have had quite a bit of a makeover and now there is a big push to advertise your posts. I just posted something and got the message: “Want more followers? Enable Publicize”, and then there are posts like these.
Maybe it’s because I’m not popular that I don’t understand the desire for this kind of fame, but it seems so overblown.
Jun 2nd at 11:41 am
One of the greatest pleasures of writing is getting comments from readers. If you get more traffic, the result should be more comments.
Jun 2nd at 12:33 am
I’ve been waiting for this follow button feature. Thanks a million.
Jun 2nd at 11:41 am
You couldn’t have been waiting for long. We released it 10 minutes after Twitter announced it.
Jun 2nd at 1:22 am
I always post links to my blog on facebook and Twitter, but I will have to try this too. Thanks!
Jun 2nd at 2:01 am
Can this be automatically added to future posts with some bit of code, and if so, how would that be done? The way you’ve outlined it above, you’d have to manually re-use the code in each new post.
It’s a cool idea because I do a lot of social networking…
Jun 2nd at 11:42 am
It can’t be automatically added to posts. I would suggest using a text widget in your sidebar instead.
Jun 2nd at 2:33 am
This is an amazing idea! I love multi-tasking, and now my blog can multi-task on its own
I can’t wait to try this out!
Jun 2nd at 5:12 am
Thanks for sharing really helpful. It works and and rocks.
Jun 2nd at 6:25 am
One of the best features ever!
Jun 2nd at 7:36 am
Interesting… but I don’t use Twitter.
Jun 2nd at 7:38 am
Cool – I don’t really like the way the widget currently renders, but the follow button I like a lot. Just a thought: it may be nice to support multi-author blogs in the widget by allowing multiple Twitter accounts to be added.
Nice work, it’s always good to visit this blog and see the new stuff you’ve cooked up. I am predicting Google’s +1 button will be next
Jun 2nd at 11:44 am
You can actually add multiple Twitter widgets to you sidebar.
Jun 2nd at 10:56 am
Really, I love this widget. Nice. Thanks for sharing this.
Jun 2nd at 12:53 pm
It all sounds pretty good but don’t you have to be ‘on twitter’ to take part? I haven’t a clue what to do about that. I think I am a bit long in the tooth to try and grasp anything else and keep up with it.
Jun 2nd at 12:57 pm
This is great, thanks. But how can i get the actual Twitter “follow” icon/button, instead of just text? I feel like my whole twitter widget is so much text and not enough graphic. I’ve thought that since i started using it.
Thanks so much.
Jun 3rd at 1:01 am
Check out http://en.support.wordpress.com/twitter-follow-button/
Jun 2nd at 1:26 pm
Thanks a lot Nick! An option to integrate Facebook “like box” too – please.
Jun 2nd at 1:34 pm
Great Information. I am just starting to blog and tweet. Very Helpful.
Jun 2nd at 1:46 pm
Awesome! I love tweeting and this is gonna be so useful for me! Thanks.
Jun 2nd at 1:51 pm
This is great stuff. Kudos to WP! I’m loving my blogging experience…
Jun 2nd at 6:21 pm
It’s amazing how fast you guys deployed the “Follow” Button. Great job!
Jun 2nd at 10:18 pm
It would be even nicer if we could use the official twitter app, I know its Java script and won’t run on WP, the twitter app is configurable and can match to the blog colours rather than that clunky thing. Also the FB connect doesn’t work, it won’t cross post.
Jun 2nd at 11:34 pm
Great Info. Love reading all the comments! Keep em coming!
Jun 3rd at 10:53 am
I just don’t get Twitter. It’s like Facebook without all the stuff that makes Facebook cool.
Jun 3rd at 12:23 pm
This sounds nice; except I am not an active tweeter. So, there is no reason for following me. Here is what I’d like to see implemented. I’m already taking advantage of tweeting my posts via Publicize and have my site set to enable sharing via Twitter. How about automatic tweets sent to Twitter? Here is what I mean. When I click on “Publicize”, a single tweet is automatically sent to my Twitter page. Why not schedule a tweet to occur up to a max of 3 to 5 times a day and at specific time period.
My problem is, I have been tweeting my blog posts updates for quite some time. I have only 175 followers. I’ve seen very little traffic coming from Twitter and yet I get plenty from Facebook. My thought is, I’d like to increase the visibility of my blog update tweets. Hence, the request for multiple sending of tweets. Love to hear of other solutions, though.
Jun 3rd at 6:43 pm
Very nice integration and I love the options. Perfect timing too since I just built my blog and haven’t locked in my layout. Keep the updates coming!
Jun 4th at 12:19 am
i can’t believe how easy it was to add this to my blog, thank you so much WordPress. You’ve made me fall in love with you all over again.
Jun 4th at 7:10 am
That’s awesome, but when can we display some of our twitter followers in the sidebar?
Jun 4th at 10:18 am
Nice new enhanced Twitter link. Well done.
TY for all you do.
Still waiting for the link that very many of us need to Facebook. We need to update those fan pages/business pages in Facebook. Been waiting a long time…don’t you know how much us guys pay you for WordPress (oh forgot you’re free).
Jun 4th at 7:46 pm
Question – does WP currently allow users to use follow buttons (and other buttons) from outside sources such as this: http://shabbyblogs.com/?page_id=110
I’ve been trying to use the Image widget but the url disappears every time. I like the addition of the twitter follow button and I’ve got it on my site now but I’d really like to use some additional buttons and badges from other sites. Is that possible?
Thanks.
Jun 4th at 7:59 pm
All of the codes given on that page are invalid HTML. Add a space before the /> of the img tag and they’ll work.
Jun 4th at 11:11 pm
Good info, the only problem I have had is very few responses from Twitter. I have gotten responses from some other sources but Twitter has been fairly poor.
Jun 5th at 6:53 am
It was so easy – a couple of clicks and that was it, done. I like Barry Brindisi’s idea re multiple publicizing for every tweet (e.g 3 or 4 times/day)). This will hit more time zones. I know you can do it through some apps but I don’t like the way they ask for so much control on your account.
Jun 5th at 7:03 am
Just saw a comment about the Google +1 button. I would like to chip in a request for a WP fit for that too. I’m fairly niche with my cancer nutrition and recipe blog so I need all the help I can get. Thanks!
Jun 6th at 1:40 am
I love these upgrades. Thank you, WP team.
Jun 6th at 2:11 am
Where the heck is the Twitter widget? PLEASE, PLEASE make instruction clear and from STEP ONE before you post stuff like this. I could tear my hair out when a writer assumes I’m supposed to automatically know something instead of making it clear.
Smoke rising from brain now.
Jun 6th at 10:39 pm
We provided a link to the Twitter Widget support doc in the post. Here it is again: http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/twitter-widget/
Jun 6th at 3:56 am
Wow. That actually helps me a lot .
Thank you.
Jun 6th at 4:39 am
Why can’t we do this for Facebook without plugins? Or can we?
Jun 6th at 10:41 pm
We don’t have a feature to friend someone on Facebook.
Jun 6th at 1:25 pm
Hi Nick! I’ve added the new twitter widget to my blog. However, I`d really like to use twitter`s widget (http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets/widget_profile) because it has more options for personalizing the appearance. I`ve tried it and it`s not working, the only thing showing on the blog is the source code itself. Is there anything I can do about this? Thanks!
Jun 6th at 10:43 pm
You won’t be able to use this on WordPress.com because it’s a script. See http://en.support.wordpress.com/code/
Jun 6th at 1:34 pm
I’ve been wanting this. Thank you!
Jun 6th at 3:08 pm
Oh great, this will definitely come in handy. Thanks WP!