Trackbacks, pingbacks, Google Alerts… There are lots of ways to find out who’s talking about your blog posts. But it’s more difficult to know if you’ve been mentioned on Twitter, where a variety of URL-shortening services disguise the final destination.
Now there’s a way you can tap into those conversations. TweetBacks, by Dan Zarrella, is a service that finds links to your blog that have been posted to Twitter via the most popular URL-shortening services. With just a bit of JavaScript you can include those mentions on your blog post just like trackbacks. Dan even has a WordPress plugin to make it easier.
TweetBacks includes several options, such as including Twitter avatars and excluding TweetBacks from certain users. The service also includes “TweetStats,” so you can display a list of your most Twittered posts.
A lot of people have moved their link blogging to Twitter, which makes it a growing source of traffic for some websites. A service that lets you tap into that community and bring the conversation back to your blog could be very popular.
What do you think? Will you be adding TweetBacks to your blog?
Dan Zarrella did an awesome job, but I suggest you also take a look at the wordpress plugin over at http://www.yoast.com
The difference? Yoast's plugin saves everything to the DB in the comments table and does not rely on the javascript file that's pointed to danzarrella.com.
Btw, be sure to check out my “tweet stats” plugin that works in conjunction with tweetbacks. It adds a “most tweeted posts” and “recently tweeted posts” widget to your site
http://www.improvingtheweb.com/wordpress-plugins/…
HIGHLY useful plugin for those that watch who is linking back to them. It really seems like Twitter has struck gold with their services.
-Mike
Excellent content here and a nice writing style too – keep up the great work!
I plan on adding this plugin to my blog, it seems like a great addition.
Thanks for the info.. I'm going to check this out