First to integrate your Twitter feed on to your blog there are a couple items you can use. Tweet My Blog will allow you to easily add your latest tweets to your sidebar. It will also send your latest blog post out as a tweet to your Twitter account automatically.

A similar plugin with a few more features is Twitter Tools. This will also allow you to use your tweets as blog posts.

Either of these tools will allow you to automate the process and send tweets when you update your blog along with showing your tweets on your blog.

There is another tool that will allow you to auto post your blog posts to Twitter. It’s called Twitter Feed and will monitor your blog’s RSS feed and post to Twitter when it finds new information on a regularly scheduled basis. It also works with other services like  Ping.fm. This service allows you to post at one place and have it update Twitter along with your other social sites like Facebook, Friend Feed, et al.

Another good plugin allows you to add a place in your comments for people to leave their Twitter username. It’s called WP Twitip ID. It makes it easy for you and your readers to follow your commenters on Twitter, which adds a great sense of community and interactivity. It also allows your readers to connect with those leaving valuable comments which is a true win–win and another way for others to contribute to the conversation there.

The final tool that I have found is called Mr. Tweet. Follow Mr. Tweet and you will receive recommendations of people you should be following and he will recommend you to others. This allows you to expand your sphere of influence from their recommendations.

It will save you time although you could and should be finding those worthwhile people yourself and following them as you find them.

So that’s a very brief introduction to some Twitter tools for bloggers. I’ll be looking at more in the future. In the final part of this series of three posts, we will look at using Twitter for research for your blog.

“Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”

Now a bit of a disclaimer here. There are thousands of articles about Twitter and how best to use it and no one agrees on what is best. Here I am looking only at how you can use this to improve and leverage your blogging efforts.

Twitter can be used for much more than that but that is not our topic here.

So we have the Wikipedia definition and here is my take on it and what a blogger needs to know and use.

Twitter is a micro blog platform. You are limited to 140 characters per post. This forces you to be concise and keep each tweet (Twitter post) to just one topic.

The key to effectively using Twitter is to understand that it is a conversation between people. It is about sharing information. It is not a sales platform although some will disagree with that. I am not saying that you can’t use it to sell but you need to do it the right way.

If you are planning to use Twitter just as a platform to send out your links forget it now. Just like a blog you need to supply valuable information and build your reputation as a valuable resource.

Do that and when you occasionally recommend something people will be interested. Just send links and very few will continue to follow you.

It works like any type of networking. It is most valuable when you are sorting information about your niche to help others. It’s just like a blog: you find valuable resources from others, then let people know about what is valuable to you, your blog readers and your Twitter followers.

Just like in offline networking – you don’t go to the local Chamber meeting and introduce your business. You talk to people there and ask about theirs. Have an idea that can help them – share it. Do that and you develop relationships that will help your business not because you pitched your business but because you became a valuable resource that others will recommend. Twitter works the same way.

In the next post in this short introduction about Twitter for bloggers, I’ll introduce some of the Twitter tools that might work for your blog.