photo credit: waltercolor
Tweetpress puts you in the driver seat when sharing your photos on Twitter
By now most of you at have heard of Twitter.com in some way, shape or form. It is kind of hard not to since this micro-blogging platform is literally everywhere including the mainstream media. From the three-letter news channels to the billboard next to the freeway – Twitter is everywhere… Most people use it for fun, some use it to stay in contact with friends, some people use it for marketing and broadcasting their message, and a select few even used it to try winning the presidential election.
Personally I have been on twitter since early 2008 and have become fond of sending images from my smartphone iPhone to share them with the “Twitterverse”. Until recently there was only one problem: Sending photos to Twitter required some kind of third party service like twitpic or yfrog. Regardless on how and whereto you upload the image you want to broadcast via Twitter, it has to be hosted somewhere and there has to be a URL in your tweet linking to that image, and since Twitter only allows you 140 characters per post, that link is better be short.
As I mentioned before there are a lot of free service who provide free image hosting, however using them you potentially give up a little bit of freedom and control. You know, nothing is for free and most of the time you see some sort of subliminal advertisement next to that image you just snapped with your smart phone. Oh, and have you read the terms and conditions before you started sending your photo to a third party? But that is not all, guess where all the internet traffic goes? Bingo! You just sent your Twitter followers to some other place.
Now there is a solution to get a little bit more control on broadcasting images via Twitter on the internet if you use a self-hosted WordPress blog. Tweetpress, a plugin for WordPress by Brandon Trebitowski, allows you not to worry about copyrights or licensing. You have total control and ownership of the images you share via Twitter, and probably the best of it all, there won’t be any questionable ads or commercials next to your images if you choose to do so.
As soon as I discovered this plugin I had to install it and so far I can see a lot of benefits.
- Full control over the images you post to Twitter
- Drive more traffic to your own website rather than some 3rd party site
- Customizable image gallery
- Maintain the rights to YOUR photos
But there are also following things to consider:
- Hosting your images will take up room on your server
- No commenting feature for each individual image.
- If you want to share images from your mobile device then you will need a twitter client/app which supports Tweetpress
So far I really like being in control over hosting my photos (you can see my Twitter Pics here) I share via Twitter and I can see Tweetpress to develop into a powerful traffic-booster.
Implementing TweetPress is fairly simple and you can find all the facts of TweetPress on Brandon’s blog or directly on Wordrpess.org. Heck, if I can do it then you can, too – just don’t forget to buy Brandon a cup of coffee.
