How To Add A Twitter Widget To Your WordPress Blog

Today I’ll give step by step instructions to add a Twitter widget to your WordPress blog.  I was asked a question on LinkedIn recently that I thought I’d share here for everyone to benefit from.

I will try to do this more frequently, so if you have any particular questions about social media, community building, blogging, or something similar, please feel free to send them on over.  You can leave your questions in the comments section or you can reach me directly via email coree [at] marketlikeachick [dot] com, on any of my social networks which you can see in my right sidebar ——>

Here’s today’s question:

“How do I add Twitter to my WordPress blog so that it shows my tweets and is there a way to show my Twitter lists I’ve created on my blog too?“

There’s  some nifty applications to use, and some cool looking widgets or buttons to choose from.  If you’re a beginner, the easiest and most basic way is to just use the ones provided by Twitter itself.

Adding Twitter Widgets To Your WordPress Blog

1.  Log in to your Twitter profile and scroll to the bottom of any page.  Locate and click on the “Goodies” link.

2.  On the Goodies page there are 3 options: Applications, Widgets and Buttons. Apps are more for mobile devices, so just ignore those for now.  If you want your Twitter stream to show on your blog you will choose a “widget”.  Use the “button” if you just want to people to be able to click on that and find you on Twitter without anything else showing on your blog.

3.  Click on Widget link, then choose where you would like to display it. For a blog you will click on “Website” (You’ll see the options for adding the widget to Facebook & Myspace as well)

4. Choose your widget and customize your widget.  You will have options to change colors and size to blend with your blog’s color scheme.  Make sure you choose the right size to fit into your sidebar.

• Profile widget will show your latest Tweets.

• Search widget can be set to search your chosen keywords and display the results on your blog. This would be a cool feature if you were tracking an event, for instance, and wanted to display all the latest tweets that related to that event hashtag.  Or, in my example, I chose the keyword search term “women entrepreneurs” to display any mention on Twitter for that term.

• Faves Widget will only show the tweets that you have starred as your favorites.  Only displaying the best or most relevant tweets rather than some of the useless, where did you have lunch type of stuff. This only works well if you actively “favorite” some tweets with the star function. I don’t do that much, but maybe I should.

• List Widget will allow you to choose a Twitter list you have made with your favorite followers, or a niche group of followers, and display the tweets from that list on your blog.  You can set it up with a title and a caption to personalize the widget and allow for some creativity.

5.  Copy the html code. Once you’ve chosen and customized your widget you will need to click “Finish and Grab Code”. A box will appear with the code.  Click on the box once which will highlight all the code then hit “Control-C” on your keyboard to copy.

6.  Add to your WordPress sidebar.  From your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance, then Widgets. 

7.  From your Widget screen you will want to choose a “Text” widget.  Just click and drag to where you would like the widget to appear in your Sidebar.  Open the Text widget and copy the Twitter code into that box.  Hit “Save” and you’re done.

8.  Go check our your new Twitter widget on your homepage to make sure it looks just like you planned.  You should be up and running!

Hopefully that covered everything you need to know to get a simple Twitter widget into your WordPress blog.  It’s basically the same procedure to add Twitter buttons to your blog, too.  I use a different set of buttons that I found by searching around and had to manually hyperlink them to my social media profiles.  Maybe we can cover adding social media buttons on a later post.

Feel free to leave any questions about adding Twitter widgets to your blog below.  Or, if you’d like me to cover a certain Twitter topic just leave that in the comments as well!  Thanks!

To Your Success,

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Tagged as:  Twitter · Twitter Widgets · Wordpress