I just checked Twitter page and I now have 5 followers — and when you consider that I am entirely incompetent when it comes to Twitter, that’s not too shabby. With luck, more people who like Twitter will enjoy my posts and stop by. (I also need to devote some time to visiting my Twitter followers. After all, if they are following my blog, it’s likely they blog on topics that interest me!)

Can you create link juice at Twitter?

Unfortunately, you can’t. As Andy Beard noted, Twitter Links are nofollow. That holds for the self-promotional ones you create by pinging from your blog, and also editorial links to other blogs that might interest people. So, if you like someone else’s blog, it’s fine to mention them in a Tweet, but link them at your blog too.

Then is it worth the time to ping?

Yes! Traffic is traffic. Traffic from followers is a really good type of traffic. Twitter gives them a way to follow you.

Mind you, if pinging Twitter took any time, it might not be worth the effort. But the fact is, once you install “Twitter Updater” plugin on your Wordpress blog, it pings Twitter automatically when you publish.

I now need to find a plugin that lets me show my tweets here at my blog. I need it to help publicise the fact that I can be followed at Twitter, but the one from Twitter often loaded slowly. Also, since Twitter nofollows my links, I feel that, in fairness, I need to nofollow my links to their site.

I now think of using Twitter the way I use feeds. Some people want track posts on Twitter instead of RSS; so make it easy! (Oh, and by the way, in fairness, I should tell you I got the idea of pinging Twitter by observing Jason Calacanis, who has been pinging Twitter for a whilenow. He seems to be a master of publicity; when you see him using something, you can guess it works! )

Of course it would!

So, I decided to modify the string I send using WordTwit: This involves adding code to WordTwit. But what should I send to Twitter?

Examining twitter, I noticed I get to enter 140 characters. I also noticed the url gets changed into a tinyurl that takes up to 28 characters– which I will round up “just in case”. I’m guessing (only guessing) that to get tags to show, I need to keep the title, tags and any extra characters to less than 110 characters. (That leaves room for the 30 character tiny url.)

So, I did a bit of coding to chop long titles down to 40 characters and slap on some categories at the end of the the message . I only add categories if they fit inside the 110 character budget.

The only way to test this is to post, so I’m doing that. We’ll see if this shows at Twitter! Here’s sort of what my Twit should look like if it works: