Twitter and WordPress are a match made in heaven. With plugins like Twitter Tools it has the power to streamline communication so that you can play in all the “social networking” sandboxes, without having to manually update each one.

Here’s an overview of the plugin from the author:

Twitter Tools integrates with Twitter by giving you the following functionality:

* Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 10 minutes)

* Create a blog post from each of your tweets

* Create a daily or weekly digest post of your tweets

* Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post

* Post a tweet from your sidebar

* Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens

* Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)

The integration is fairly simple and straightforward. If you need assistance you can contact WP-TravelDesign for assistance.

After installation If you’re comfortable with making a quick replacement of code, a couple of hacks that improve the quality of your posts==>tweets.

First, set your twitter tools settings to automatically create a tweet from a blog post. Then edit the /wp-content/plugins/twitter-toools.php file starting at line 171 as follows:

Change
$this->tweet_prefix = ‘New Blog Post’;

to

$this->tweet_prefix = ‘CruiseDeal’;

Or something else that more accurately reflects an intro.

and change

$this->tweet_format = $this->tweet_prefix.’: %s %s’;

to

$this->tweet_format = $this->tweet_prefix.’: %s %s #cruise #travel’;

to include the “Hash Tags” that can be searched in Twitter. Upload and test.