Hi!
Back with another video tutorial. If you’ve seen people tweeting out stuff entitled “From the archives:….” or “Old Post!…” and wondered how they’re doing that, I have the answer for you today.
If you’re on WordPress self-hosted, you can use a superawesome plugin called Tweet Old Post to do this. And this tutorial shows you how to configure Tweet Old Post to maximize eyeballs on posts you never thought would see the light of day again. Enjoy!
Watch How To Use Tweet Old Post Tutorial
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Thanks so much for sharing this. I didn’t even know that this type of plug in existed. We run an online business and have several blogs with tons of info in them. I am going over to look at this plug in and see if we can bring in more visitors! Thanks again!
you’re welcome!
Just another quickie – Set up for this was very easy and it works very well. Highly recommended
oh that’s so interesting….I am moving to wordpress soon and I will use this. THANK YOU for sharing it.
Glad you found it useful!
Interesting. I could only watch the first few minutes right now, but will check it out in full later. I honestly thought people just went back through their archives and picked some of their favorite old posts to tweet.
Not sure I’d want to tweet out some of my old posts, though. Some I look back on now and cringe. Oh, how naive I was as a noob blogger.
Yes, if you choose to use this you have to really think carefully about how you configure things. The nice thing is you can exclude specific posts that are no longer relevant, or that you now think suck (I have many of those myself!).
ooh, fun plug-in!
I’m with Kristin – I just assumed people got the link from their own archives the old fashioned way…
I would love to use this someday since (in the beginning) very few people read my posts.
But I haven’t been at it long enough, I think, to really fall back on my “archives” yet; having posted only once a week (usually).
It’s not like I’ve accumulated a library of old posts.
Not sure what the etiquette is with this. How long should you be blogging before you repost something from your past?
What about guest posts for other blogs? When is it okay to throw them up at your own site (assuming you give acknowledgement to the blog where it originally appeared again)???
So many questions, such a dumb blogger. (me, of course. YOU are a genius.
)
I think your question about how long you should be blogging before retweeting is really dependent upon the individual blogger, how many posts you have, how fast your blog has grown. I didn’t use this particular plugin until I had over 450 posts in my archive because I didn’t want it to keep tweeting out the same 5 posts
As far as guest posts? You need to be careful with that. If you re-post on your own blog a post you’ve written for someone else, you are hurting yours and/or that person’s SEO and link juice. Google does not like duplicative content, and it’s going to penalize the party who has a lower page rank.
I have never taken my work and put it up on my own blog after it’s been used as a guest post somewhere else. this is a good post topic, Julie. Do you mind if I write a post about it next week?
Absolutely post about it!
I am always curious about blog “etiquette” and really appreciate the practical/ethical wisdom you share.
I spend a lot of time worrying that I’ve got toilet paper stuck to the bottom of my shoe so anything you can do to help me NOT make a fool of myself is appreciated!
All the knowledge you spread? Really awesome.
Thanks!
As far as installing the plug-in, using the “Add New” from the Plug-In menu on your WP Dashboard is a nice 2-or-3 click solution to not having to download the zip and do a hard install to your WP Admin panel. That always saves me time and is much less confusing for me.
While I think it’s important to bring older content to newer reader’s eyes, this particular plug-in – or perhaps how it’s used by many bloggers – drives me nuts. I see SO many of these “From the Archives” tweets in my stream that are linking to time-sensitive posts – giveaways or “big announcements” or whatever – that are completely irrelevant today. In fact, I *never* click through on these tweets (time-sensitive or not), because I’m generally more interested in the here-and-now.
What I would do, though, is click through to an old post if someone tweeted out why they wanted to share it again or what made it still special to that person, etc. Which means the blogger is manually going through old posts to breath fresh life into them. Obviously this takes a lot more time for that blogger, but I think it’s *much* more meaningful than scheduling automatic tweets.
As I said in the tutorial, this plugin can be misused for sure. However, the depth of its configuration options allow bloggers to prevent time-sensitive posts from tweeting out that might not be relevant to readers 6 months down the road. For example, I completely exclude the giveaway category from ever tweeting out via this plugin. From time to time, posts get tweeted that I wish hadn’t – but I’d say it’s one in 25 or 30 where that happens.
I think a lot depends on the content of the blog as well. A deal blogger would be ill-advised to use this plugin. For me, 90% of my posts are humor, parenting essays, blogging tips or recipes – most of which don’t lose their impact based on when they’re shared. In fact, people have actually thanked me for particular posts on blogging that they didn’t see the first time. In my personal case, the benefits outweigh the negatives. But it’s different for everybody.
I’ve seen this used – and one twitter-er ONLY uses it [she's been busy w/ a newborn]…You So Smaht, woman!
Seems like a great plug-in. Though my problem is I have a really sad twitter following. I can tweet posts to my hearts content and I fear I’m just annoying my 100 followers.
Any advice for a fairly new blogger trying to increase her audience who has a relatively small following at the moment?
The key is really to keep engaging on Twitter and reading and commenting on blogs! and, when you find blogs you like, make sure you follow them on Twitter too, and talk to them there. It is a lot of work. I wrote a post back in September about how to grow your blog following if you have a small # of followers:
http://www.kludgymom.com/top-10-networking-tips-for-growing-bloggers-100-300-followers-b2sb2b-week-3/
This is such a brilliant tutorial! I admit, I wondered how the heck bloggers manage to tweet old posts. I think this will be super helpful for me w/recipe posts. Thanks so much for the heads up and the instructions!
I’m glad you liked it, Jen!
this plugin hardly works. Authorized no problem. When I pushed TWEET NOW> it says no posts found.
thoughtS?
When that happens to me,i always do the deactivate plugin and reactivate to try again. you’ll also want to make sure you haven’t accidentally excluded ALL of your blog categories!
I’ve tried to deauth and auth already 10 times. I even removed the file. cleaned anything left over with “clean options” plugin and still get the same error ” NO tweets found to post”.. its very frustrating. Thoughts?
This is a clean WP install. NO additional plugins installed.
jn
Wish I had other suggestions! I’ve not had any issues whatsoever.
Sorry it’s not working. I have no real coding skills to offer help!
Very helpful tutorial about this plug-in!
Tweeted my first flashback post a few minutes ago
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