Twitter Tools Connection Failure? Try Hootsuite!

I’ve seen a lot of bloggers with the Twitter Tools dilemma since Twitter changed their authorization method for third party connections. Now, your password can’t be stored in a third party application – it has to go through OAuth which has cause a lot of disarray in the blogging world for those who typically were dependent on Twitter Tools to display their tweets in their blog sidebars and publish their blog post links to their Twitter streams automatically, complete with hashtags, mentions, and even bit.ly URL shortening. OAuth is actually a wonderfully fabulous thing. There are a ton of benefits, the most important of which is that it is definitely a lot more secure.

While developers get the kinks worked out of their software, we’re just going to have to do some working around the issues we’re seeing on our end. I’m not terribly disappointed about not being able to feed my tweets into my sidebar, but if you are, try the Twitter Widget Pro WordPress plugin and you’ll be back in business in no time :) For blog post link feeding into your social media networks, use Hootsuite. You set up an RSS feed that will feed your blog posts into your tweet stream. You don’t have the option of hashtagging… and your URL will now either be a ht.ly or ow.ly link rather than bit.ly but I’m sure it’s better than manually posting your links, right?

It’s easy – and to make it even easier, here’s a visual aid:

If you don’t already have an account, visit www.Hootsuite.com and sign up. Set up your social media accounts and you’re good to go.

Click the little owl’s head in the top left hand corner to bring down your user control panel menu – go to settings, then click on RSS/Atom:

Once you’re there, click on the Add New Feed button, complete the form with your feed information and preferences, select the accounts you want to publish to, and then save. That’s it. Your blog feed will now publish into the social media accounts you chose.

I’ll update when I’ve found a solution to the Twitter Tools issue because I certainly enjoyed the features it offers, such as archiving tweets and of course hashtagging.