The official Twitter plugin helps you to share your blog using twitter cards to make your links stand out from the card, gives you a follow button and the ability to customise your embedded tweets. Alongside all this, you get access to enhanced twitter analytics, so what are you waiting for?

3 steps to setting up the official twitter plugin on self hosted wordpress.

Install the plugin.

You’ve probably seen twitter cards attached to tweets before now – they’re the ones with summaries or images attached. They stand out from the stream, and give people an idea what they’re clicking through to. The first step to getting all this goodness on your site is installing the plugin. Go to Plugins >Add new and search for twitter. You’re looking for the official plugin. Once you’ve found it, hit install.

[Note, this plugin requires PHP 5.4 or higher. If you’re not sure whether you’ve got that, it’s a question for your hosting provider.]

Setup post formats.

This official plugin uses post formats to decide what card to share with a post. Post formats are theme reliant – if you’ve already got them active, you’re looking for a radio button probably over there on the right, with a list of possible formats as described here. (If you don’t have them visible, the first thing to do is check the screen options (top left) and make sure that you don’t just have the Format option switched off. See the image below for details.)

If Format isn’t in your screen options list though, that means your theme doesn’t support them. Don’t panic, there are still options. For example if you’re using a Genesis theme, you can grab the code snippets from studiopress here and add them to your child theme functions.php. (You’ve got a child theme, right?)

If you’re not on Genesis there’s an informative article here on how to add them to your theme.

Validating your chosen card types.

The other webpage you’re going to need to make friends with is the twitter card validator itself. For each card type you want to use, you need to validate a post with the right markup. This sounds a bit complicated, but it’s as simple as filling in the setup detail in the plugin (basically your twitter handle) and then either editing old posts to be the format you want (from photo and gallery) and submitting the link to the validator. A normal post comes through as a summary card.

For each card, a good picture is a great idea, although a gallery needs 4. Once you have the cards validated against your domain, any time anyone tweets from your site, a card will go along with the tweet, and you’ll get to see all of it in your enhanced analytics (under your twitter profile).

The twitter plugin also offers an enhanced twitter follow button, and tweet button, but to my mind, the cards are the real winner here. Let me know if you get them set up.

Twitter cards are the latest upgrade to twitter that allows you to add extra information to your tweet when sharing a link. They come in a number of different formats – the one that is most likely to be useful to a business or personal blog is the summary card, which adds a headline, excerpt and pic. Big platforms like wordpress.com have already implemented cards for their users – but it’s easy to do if you’re self hosted as well.

Still not sure what they are? Here’s an example – my first tweeted article from technology solved that includes a twitter card.

Ten minute tip – sharing and following. http://t.co/6jFrL4zcvM (testing twitter cards integration).

— Jax Blunt (@liveotherwise) June 15, 2013

The card gives you that extra bit under the 140 characters, and hopefully makes your tweet that little bit more enticing to encourage click through. You’ve probably seen them on twitter from newspaper articles at the very least.

As you might imagine, there are a number of different ways to implement them for your site. Yoast’s WordPress SEO has a twitter section under social if you’re using it, or you can go for a standalone plugin that just does the card integration, which is what I’ve opted for this time, using Twitter Cards.

The plugin doesn’t require any set up, but you do then go to validate it at twitter itself. I was a bit dismayed once I’d filled in all the fields to get a message saying I’d get feedback in a few weeks – but being the impatient sort, I tested it anyway, and it worked fine.

Big hint: twitter cards apply to individual articles, *not* to your home page. If you look for the markup in your homepage you won’t find it, and if you try to validate your home page it will fail. Work from a post within your site. (There, I’ve just saved you the ten minutes I wasted doing it wrong earlier!) Also, it seems that short link tweets from the jetpack publicise don’t get the card associated with them, possibly because it’s not showing the validated domain?

And that’s about all there is to it. So off you pop and give it a whirl, and let me know how you get on. If you found this article useful, don’t forget to follow the blog either via email or on G+.