Broadcasting the voices of WordPress users, one Tweet at a time

Tuesday, 11 March 2014

By now, most everyone with an Internet connection has read a WordPress blog or site. With over 76 million sites and 14 billion monthly pageviews, WordPress is possibly the most popular, easy-to-use blogging platforms out there.

We worked with Raanan, SVP at Automattic —the makers of WP.com — to integrate the Twitter platform. WordPress users now have a simple way to distribute their content to their Twitter followers and over 240M other people on Twitter. Here’s how this integration worked.

Simple sharing with Twitter OAuth

WordPress.com and WordPress self-hosted sites running the Jetpack plugin make it easy to share blog content on Twitter. It took them just three simple steps to implement the Twitter OAuth API:

Broadcasting the voices of WordPress users, one Tweet at a time

With the OAuth integration, the user’s blog and Twitter account are now connected. Moreover, as each new post is published, a corresponding Tweet is automatically posted, making sharing content on Twitter a seamless part of a blogger’s everyday workflow.

Twitter Cards for greater distribution and engagement

WordPress also implemented Twitter Cards so that the beautiful photos, videos and other media that their users are posting are automatically attached to their tweets. 

We want to ensure that WordPress looks fantastic on Twitter, so that we help our bloggers grow their sites and build their Twitter relationships.

Raanan Bar-Cohen@raananSVP, Automattic

WordPress automatically generates the necessary Twitter Cards markup for every post, as in this example:

@postaday" />

These five lines of code enable a richer, more compelling Tweet: 

 

Twitter Insights tells how content is being distributed

With the launch of analytics for Twitter Cards, WordPress is now able to see results from their OAuth and Twitter Cards integration. From their dashboard view for their WordPress.org running the Jetpack Cards plugin with Cards support, they can now see that they receive 408 million impressions every week. Moreover, it gives them a baseline to continue tweaking and optimizing their Cards implementation.

WordPress with Twitter Analytics

WordPress has done a seamless integration with the Twitter platform to give their users greater reach and beautifully presented content. They use OAuth to connect directly to Twitter, share content on Twitter on their users’ behalf, implement Cards to give their Tweets extra reach, and measure and optimize performance with Twitter Card analytics.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress expressed his excitement about this integration for strengthening WordPress as a social hub. 

Networks like Twitter bring new audiences to blogs helping in the mission of democratizing publishing @photomatt 

Matt Mullenweg@photomattCEO and Founder of Automattic, Co-founder of WordPress

As Raanan noted, WordPress’ mission is to give voice to the people of the world. We happen to share that goal, and so we are glad to help Raanan, Joey, Justin, StephaneKelly and the rest of great team at WordPress in this implementation.

To get started with the Twitter platform, read our documentation on Twitter OAuth, Twitter Cards or browse our Twitter Platform features. If you have further questions, don’t hesitate to tweet to Ryan.