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Tweet Old Post Plugin for WordPress Effectively Draws In More Comments

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Awhile ago, I decided to try Tweet Old Post by Ajay Matharu on my own websites to see how effective it was. The great thing is that it allows you to bring back content that you just do not have the time to manually tweet again or even program to schedule. I have found Tweet Old Post plugin to be a great plugin for WordPress users.

Blogging and engaging takes time. Regardless if your blog is part of your business or it is for fun, anything to save time to engage in conversation with others is a big plus. For me, I am not much on installing gobs of plugins, but I believe this is something that anyone that pumps out relevant and timeless material could benefit. This also keeps your Twitter stream looking active.

This plugin has gone through a lot of bumps in the past, most circling around the Twitter authorization issues. There were some cases that I read that posts were duplicated, but when looking at the sites, there were not many posts to begin with. Most the the usage errors had come from not setting up the plugin correctly as it requires you to schedule your tweets and make sure to pay attention to the numbers put in the plugin’s fields. Otherwise, Tweet Old Post is quite an effective plugin.

Tweet Old Post Features

  • Ability to add a custom tweet prefix.
  • Option to add hashtags.
  • Schedule when old posts may be tweeted.
  • Limit how old posts are allowed to be.
  • Restrict plugin from publishing tweets from certain categories.

I noticed comments on older posts had risen nearly 60%. I can only conclude that it is because that the post had been tweeted at a time that was able to reach more users than the first time I had ever tweeted the post. This is a huge plus for bloggers who love to talk with their readers. Correction: Tweet Old Post is a HUGE PLUS for anyone, including businesses who want to engage more with readers.

Do you use Tweet Old Post or something similar? What do you think of it?

About

Sassy blonde mom from Southern Illinois who is a Professional Blogger, AND a WordPress web designer and developer. Nile loves to help others rock out their blogs and social media handles. If it was not already apparent, she is addicted to WordPress, Blogging, Social Media, and in general, anything about the Internet. It is not uncommon to see her speak at WordCamps (WordPress conferences) and blogging conferences across the United States. Her website is Blondish.net.

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{ 55 Responses }

  1. Aritra Roy says:
    I definitely use this plugin to increase my visitors, are there any other similar plugin lyk this one...??
  2. Gautam A D says:
    i will check it out right away! thanx for sharing. :)
  3. Nea says:
    This sounds like a great idea. I'm glad that I ran across this article and I can't wait to try it out.
  4. Cheryl from thatgirlisfunny says:
    I'm looking forward to benefiting from this Tweet Old Posts plugin. I just installed it yesterday. I have to go through and mark the posts that I don't want to have retweeted. Other than that investment of time, I'm delighted to know that old posts will have their day in the sun - again.
  5. Latief says:
    This plug in is great to refresh our old article and send them to the surface again, thanks Niles, I'll check and sure I'll use it! Thanks sist ;)
  6. TJ McDowell says:
    Read your bio and see you're from Southern Illinois too. Funny that there are so many of us on Famous Bloggers in this area. Kim wrote an article just a few days ago, and she's a southern Illinoiser (???) too. I'm a Belleville guy - are you further south than I am? Good article. It's always nice to see traffic on articles that you've written a while back. Makes it seem worth the time it takes to write stuff if people are going to take time to read your posts long after they are published.
  7. John says:
    This is a great way to bring some new life to your old posts and it works with out much tweeking
  8. Suresh Khanal says:
    Tweet Old Post is working great for me as well. At first I was worried and could not figure out what was going wrong, but there was some problem in the plugin itself. The issue was resolved immediately after it was updated. I'm using default settings and it is working fine. There was no other way out to speak out about my posts that were written long ago and already buried deep down. Thanks to the great plugin!
  9. Jarret says:
    Nile, this plugin definitely rocks though there were some recent technical problems. When I first installed it, there was a glitch that caused me to Tweet every single post on my blog until it crashed my server and Twitter cut it off. After that issue, there was one update that didn't work at all. It seems that all of the bugs have been worked out and it's very useful.
  10. Gabriele Maidecchi says:
    Great plugin to keep in mind for when my blog will be a bit more "juicy", for now I'll stick with the manual way but glad to see there are valuable alternatives ;)
  11. Hunter says:
    I think Tweeting old posts is a good idea. Especially if you have a lot of new followers.
  12. Hesham says:
    I think a lot of bloggers who is using the Tweet Old post plugin don't really know how to use it, or they shouldn't use it! Let me explain: - They don't know how to use it, because they didn't read configurations guide of the plugin well! - They shouldn't use it : because they don't have enough articles to tweet randomly! So.. the plugin will piss off their followers in a short time! (I really don't recommend it for new blogs under 100 posts!) I use it on FB since a few weeks back with no problems, we have now over 450 articles .. this means tweet duplication rate is low, especially I am tweeting only once every 2 hours! Thank you Nile for brining in this nice post!
  13. Mark says:
    I've been using this plugin for a while now. It's only recently that I've had a higher number of twitter followers that it's come into its own. I've started to see an increase in comments on older posts.
  14. Kharim says:
    I installed the Tweet Old Post as well and this has given me more traffic to my older posts and more comments :)
  15. Melvin says:
    Its a good plugin but the problem is that sometimes it doesn't work. After quite some time it stopped working on my blog and after a month the owner released an update that kind of like fixed the bug. If this plugin is error freee I can see many bloggers really utilize it.
    • Nile Flores says:
      Plugins do have flaws all the time come up. Digg Digg is one that is notorious. I have had less trouble with Tweet Old Post. As I said in the article, most of it depends on how you fill out the plugin's fields.
  16. The Bad Blogger says:
    I have installed it on my blog, and set everything to default, since I'm not sure how this plugin really works, but I don't see much of any increase in getting comment from older post just that the traffic seems to increased.
    • Nile Flores says:
      Traffic is a nice plus, but if it is comments you are looking for, you have to make sure your topic is engaging. End your topic with a question. This is something I learned from Liz Strauss, a really famous speaker who has quite a rep in the social media world. And since I employed her trick more than a year ago, this has helped a lot.
  17. Justin Germino says:
    Have been using this plugin for a while and it is fantastic, helps revitalize older posts. One thing is I wouldn't use Hashtags as when you use Hashtags your tweet will not index on search engines and people who search for critera may never find your tweet unless they were searching twitter or following the hashtag specifically.
    • Nile Flores says:
      The hashtags I think if they were tacked on the end, it might not be so bad, but because it is on the front... I do see the problem. Unless Google writes and alogrithm to recognize hashtags, it may be something that could be nice in the future. However, you would still run in for people says #1 or some other # with a number and that might confuse the alogrithm.
  18. Ryan Biddulph says:
    I don't use Tweet Old Post Nile but can see the benefit of it, especially since I am manually tweeting old posts now. Thanks for sharing with us! Ryan
    • Nile Flores says:
      It does make sense to tweet older posts. I was manually tweeting older posts before I installed the Tweet Old Post plugin. This just made things more streamlined for me. :)
  19. Rahul says:
    I love the plugin as well found most of my old ones...
    • Nile Flores says:
      That is great. Always happy to see people enjoy a good plugin. :D
  20. Dev - WordPress Hacks says:
    Hi Nile, Great Plugin. I'm using it for one of my blog and it's working great. Tweet old post plugin is must have plugin. Keep up the awesome work Nile.
    • Nile Flores says:
      Definitely a must have. When trying this plugin at first, I was hesitant as I like to not install a lot of plugins, but this has been extremely useful, just as much as my Twitter Tools. Too bad both cannot be combined. Now, that is an idea...lol.
  21. Harsh Agrawal says:
    I have using Tweet old post for some time and I really like this plugin as it helps me to drive traffic to my old posts... Though we need to take care of few things like select categories carefully as there is no need to tweet outdated posts..
    • Nile Flores says:
      For outdated posts, perhaps tweaking the category of the post to be one that is not includes. Anything that is "News" no matter the topic, even site news could be in that category. You can always use your tagging to describe your post deeper.
    • Karan Labra says:
      And we all can see the magic...Right harsh?
  22. element321 says:
    Tweet Old Post Plugin works great. I have been using it for a while and made several tweaks to it and I am happy with this tool. I do see a little more traffic to these older posts... You need add a prefix that its an older post so your followers know thats its from the achieves.
    • Nile Flores says:
      The prefix is not always necessary unless your post is not a timeless one. It is important to make sure you are selecting categories and tags in a way to strategically exclude outdated posts.
  23. John says:
    I think that is a great plug in. While I am still working on getting my blog off the ground. This will be great to use in the future when i have more content.
    • Nile Flores says:
      I wish you luck on getting your blog rolling. Definitely hope that this plugin works as well for you as it has for me.
  24. bryanb says:
    I agree that retweeting yourself from time to time improves visibility of your news. Too bad twitter isn't more like google wave...
    • Nile Flores says:
      I am reticent about using Google Wave, just because there are so many things it is doing, but a lot more it could be. Google is much like Yahoo! was well over 10 years ago.... gobbling up web resourceful sites that could prove to upend in a few years or when they get bored.
      • bryanb says:
        And yet the persistent nature of the wave is quite seductive
  25. daniellehudges says:
    This plugin I guess is useful, however I haven't tried it yet. I can't wait to try this soon. But with the old post I guess it is more effective if we just show the new ones rather than to give time on old post because I do not see any benefit from it. That is just my opinion alone.
    • Nile Flores says:
      Older posts that have timeless message and still have relevancy can still be quite useful. While the search engines do document your posts, they do nothing to put something fresh in front of people. Say if you talk about checking your PC's health and the information is still up to date, but you wrote it over a year ago, it might still be something people would like to know about. Once in a while seeing that older post again could drive attention to that site that is hiding in your archives.
  26. Fiona Bosticky says:
    I really like the idea of this plugin. But like Michael says above, if you are writing blogs about latest news, this might make you look silly. But for bloggers who write posts that never date, this could be a really cool way to drive traffic and comments to your old content. But for me, I'll have to keep doing it manually.... and selectively :)
    • Nile Flores says:
      I put a solution to that in reply to Michael's comment. It all deals with your site's organization. There are a lot of people who do not use the category and tags as they should, especially in WordPress.
  27. Michael Aulia says:
    I guess it depends on the post. For my blog, tweeting an old technology gadget/product may or may not invite good comments. Tweeting things like "A new social bookmarking site called Facebook" may not produce any good results :)
    • Jason says:
      “Tweeting things like 'A new social bookmarking site called Facebook' may not produce any good results” - LOL. If I were most bloggers, I would never give a plugin the authority to dredge something out of my archives and publish it all over again :-)
    • Nile Flores says:
      You are definitely right. It might be necessary to carefully plan to use a specific category. A lot of people freely put posts in multiple categories. The categories are general organization. The nitty gritty descriptions need to have tags. So if you have a tech gadget, perhaps "News" is a good category (I use that and exclude that on my own site with the plugin.) Then just use the tagging to specify the gadget name or any other tagging needed.
  28. Richard says:
    I have tweet old posts installed on my site and I really love it. I have it hashtagged. That way my current posts go out to my normal visitors and I tweet my old posts out with a hashtag to reach a wider audience. I think it revives my old content really well. I see a number of visitors show up to read and comment on posts that I wrote several weeks back.
    • Nile Flores says:
      It truly does. I know quite a lot of people enjoy this plugin. There are some who cannot get it to work and I am almost wondering if it is their web host's server settings. As for comments, I get a thrill when someone comes back to comment on an older post. I am sure you do get thrilled to. :D
  29. Goutham says:
    Nice share @Nile :) Will try it out in my blog. :)
    • Nile Flores says:
      Thanks... glad you enjoyed my post. Hope the plugin works well for you.
  30. Kimi says:
    It seems to be useful plugin. I usually tweet automatically via feedburner, but the newest published post. Will definitely try it, thanks!
    • Nile Flores says:
      I use Twitter Tools plugin for tweeting most recent posts. The oAuth setup on the plugin is not so bad, but can be intimidating for others. When you try it, hope it works great for you. :D
  31. Thomas Griffin says:
    I'm testing this plugin out soon to see if the functionality is worth the bumps. :) It will also keep me honest about making solid efforts at posting. :-P
    • Nile Flores says:
      I wish you luck while you test it. If you blog about things that are based on specific time, it may not be a good idea. However, even with some category tweaking and excluding, the posts that are timeless are great candidates for this plugin.
  32. Isabel Rodrigues - Pro Blogger Journey says:
    Thanks for sharing this useful plugin. We often conentrate on the new posts and ignore the old ones. This plugin is good to tweet the old ones.
    • Nile Flores says:
      Definitely, there is a lot of goodness still left in older posts. :D
  33. Dave says:
    I installed the plugin quite awhile ago. It sounds great...But then I started studying many old posts on my blog. I concluded that many of them were rather weak. I started tweaking them for SEO and/or re-writing them from the ground up. This has become a tall order. Eventually I'll be happy with them and activate the plug it :) Thanks, Now...I'll tweet ya!
    • Nile Flores says:
      For me, I have organized things like site news or anything that is not time sensitive into a different category. With the plugin, I exclude the categories and that takes care of it. It was a huge undertaking when I installed the plugin as my site has entries since 2006. I wish you luck if you do tweak your site's organization to be able to use it.