In recent years it has become pretty normal to publish your thoughts and ideas as Twitter threads (see here an official how to and example).
Instead of writing a blog and sharing it to your Twitter account, people like to use the minimal UI of Twitter for putting out a series of thoughts within seconds.
What is the downside of this? If you focus on Twitter only, your blog will get dusty and no longer be the place of your original thoughts. Also, your Twitter threads won’t be easily found via Google, as tweets, in general, are not very good indexed by search engines (and tweets with 140chars are hard to re-find anyway, even using Twitters search engine). And lastly, you are communicating within your bubble – only a fraction of internet users are on Twitter, and only a tiny fraction is following you.
And as a follower, I might miss out on your Twitter thread if I am not using Twitter in this second or the highlights feature does not bring it up at a later time.
What if you could use a little browser extension that would help you to easily re-publish your Twitter thread as a blog post on your own site?
It could work like this:
- Connect your Twitter and WordPress Account to the (Chrome) extension
- Select the Twitter thread you want to re-publish as a blog
- Post as Draft to your blog and add finishing touches
- Publish in WordPress
Benefits of a little helping tool like that would be:
- Having your ideas and thoughts up on your blog without a copy/paste job
- Link back to the individual tweets, but strip out the Twitter “embed” formatting
- Your blog can get indexed by search engines and be read all over the web, not only on Twitter
- More reasons to follow your blog
Examples of Twitter threads:
- Innovation at tech companies by @VilliSpeaks
- Fact checking headlines by @YAppelbaum
- Brexit – a history of UKs liaison with the EU by @EmporersNewC
- Reasons why you should stop using Uber by @anildash
What do you think, are you using Twitter and seeing the threads feature being used for posting blogs more often? Would you use such a tool to republish tweets as blogs, is that necessary?
