Getting Twitter Content on My Blog

Question

I'm the editor of a niche blog that posts lots of great content. We also post links to other sites/resources in our Twitter feed.

What's frustrating to me is that outside content on our Twitter feed gets lost to the ether. It's good, helpful stuff, but you can't find it three months (or years) later, like you can with our good blog content.

For example, six months ago we posted a great link on Twitter about how to use Instragram. I want to find that post again. I'd love to be able to go on my blog, look in the "Instragram" tag or search and find it.

So my question is what's the best way to get that "Twitter" content on to my blog so it's accessible in the archives? (and there could be other content like this... quotes, videos, etc.)

However, I want to avoid flooding the homepage (and to a lesser extent the RSS feed, though that's not as big of a deal) with all the micro content from Twitter. We run 2-3 regular blog posts a week. I don't want those to be drowned out by, say, 5 tweet posts per day.

And I'm not looking for the technical how-to. I know there are ways to do this. More than anything I'm looking for the strategy. Is this even a smart thing to do? What's the best way to do it? Are any sites doing this or talking about it? I don't see this conversation among the pro blogger types.

I thought post formats might be a good solution for this. Maybe filter them on the homepage or display them in a sidebar. But it sounds like post formats are a dying idea.

Another potential solution seems to be a custom post type, though it sounds like that wouldn't be integrated into the blog archives.

Another possible solution is just to blog this content. In other words, if the content is so good I want it in my blog, take the extra time to write 300 words about it instead of just 140 characters. With post formats on the way out, it sounds like this might be the preferred solution--keep it simple.

Hope that makes sense, but that's what I'm struggling with. And I'm looking for examples or strategies more than technical solutions (cuz I won't understand the tech anyway). Thanks

Answer 1

You have a couple of conflicting arguments here, but what you want to do is completely possible.

To keep something out of the RSS feeds, and considering it really is a different type of content from your blog posts, I'd recommend a custom post type called "Links" or something.

The custom post type will have its own archive and RSS feed, separate from your posts.

To get it included in your home page feed, it depends on how your home page is configured, but if it's just the "blog" archive, then it's a pretty simple filter using pre_get_posts to include your new CPT into that archive.

For distribution, you could use Jetpack or other plugins to then auto-tweet new links of your CPT. That would then handle distribution, keep the link on your site, and capable of being perused or searched later.

Last thing, based on your note about tags, would be to enable support for tags and categories on your new custom post type. That would then include both posts and links (your CPT) when someone clicks the "Instagram" tag archive, or whatever.

This does include the code, but as you said you don't need that, I think this answer should give you the roadmap you're looking for; but to implement it properly it's definitely going to take a little bit of intermediate code.

Answer 2

Use Storify to collect groups of related tweets and other content, then embed the groups on your blog.

Answer 3

WordPress oEmbed uses Twitter cards which should be at least as and possibly more SEO friendly than Storify.