Twitter and your company blog should be kept close together. There is a huge debate on how Twitter might kill blogging altogether but, in fact, they can complement each other if you use them wisely. As promised in a previous post, here is a list of plugins that can seamlessly integrate Twitter services in your Wordpress blog.

1. Twittar

Having a Gravatar enabled theme for your blog is no longer novelty, most Wordpress templates support it. However, if a majority of your readers don’t have a Gravatar account, the visual appeal of your pages will suffer. This is where Smashing Magazine’s Twittar does its magic: it connects to Twitter and fetches the avatar of your commenter, based on the email address supplied. In other words, the plugin tries to improve the chances of finding an image for your user: it attempts to get one from Twitter and, if there is no account associated with that email address, falls back to Gravatar.

2. TwitterCounter

TwitterCounter displays statistics on your followers base. I’m sure you are already advertising your RSS subscriber figures—why would you leave out your Twitter community? Having more than 1,000 followers is always something to be proud of, not to mention the widget will encourage your readers to follow you.

You shouldn’t be using this plugin if you have a low number of followers. Even if your Twitter account is brand new, it is considered bad business to brag about your 23 subscribers.

3. Autolink to Username

Autolink to Username is a very simple plugin that can make your life easier. It basically links every @username string to a Twitter URL. In other words, it turns @LifelineDesign into @LifelineDesign without further interaction from your side.

4. TwitThis

TwitThis makes it easy for your readers to tweet about your blog posts. When visitors click the TwitThis button, the plugin creates a short URL with TinyURL then redirects them to Twitter where they can send it to their friends, together with a description of your page.

5. Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is one of the most widely used Twitter plugins for Wordpress, with lots of functionalities:

• shows your most recent tweets in a sidebar;
• can be configured to create a blog post from your tweets, either one by one or as a daily or weekly digest;
• allows you to send tweets from your Wordpress admin dashboard;
• can create a tweet every time you add a new blog post and link back to the original article;
• can interact with bit.ly, Twitter’s ‘favorite’ URL shortening service.

If you know and and are using other Twitter plugins, or have written your own, you are more than welcome to share them with us.