If you’re proud of the number of Twitter friends you have then you might want to consider adding a widget called TwitterCounter to your blog or webpage.

TwitterCounter keeps track of the amount of friends following you on Twitter.

There are two different ways to add TwitterCounter to your site. The smallest and least obtrusive is the badge. While you can modify the look of the badge, it still remains small enough to not take over the whole look and feel of your site. An example of the badge is shown below:

Unfortunately, you cannot change the colors of the small badge and people have claimed that updates to the amount of followers does not always update right away. I have found this is true. TwitterCounter responded by telling members they do update every 24 hours, however there are millions of follows are it might not always happen for everyone. At the time of this writing I had 712 followers and my TwitterCounter gave me a count of 672. I believe that was the count for the day before.

The next option is the Twitter Remote widget. By adding this to your site your visitors can see who the lastest members are that follow you. As you can see in the example below it is quite large and may not fit all blogs.

With this tool you can modify the colors and personalize the look and feel a little bit more than the badge.

There is also a TwitterCounter plugin for WordPress. This plugin gives you options for either the badge or the remote widget to act like the originals yet they give you more options for design and make it easier for those who prefer to use widgets instead of code to add to their WordPress blog.

You can add your own code. The bit of code below just gives my follower count. If I felt like updating the HTML around it I could make it look really pretty.

The last option is a very basic Twitter badge with a bird and the follower count. It is the least configurable and probably the easiest to deal with:

Will TwitterCounter help you get more members to your Tweets? It is possible. If people click on the badge to see what it is then they might find your Twitter account on the list.

Are you still copying and pasting URLs to Twitter for social marketing because you can’t find the plugin that you want? If you own your own WordPress blog on your own domain there really is no reason to duplicate the efforts of your blog.

The WordPress plugin Socialite will help you get the traffic from the three major social networking sites by posting your latest blog updates automatically to Twitter, MySpace, and FaceBook. You will no longer need to maintain three individual plugs or do the posting manually.

Not only can you post your latest post, but you have the ability to tell others when your posts are edited. What I did not see that other similar plugs have is the ability to tell readers when you are writing a draft. For my needs that is fine because I scrap a lot of articles that my audience never sees.

What I would like to see form Socialite is the ability to update more than one Twitter, FaceBook and MySpace account. I would love to see this posted to the Twitter account for this blog and to my main blog account at geekmom. I am sure I have readers on geekmom that are not interested in Social Networking and SEO but would still like to update different Twitter accounts from one blog.

You can download Socialite at www.gilfether.com/socialite. It takes a few moments to setup as there are a few options, but ultimately it will run smoothly in the end and give you the ability to update the main social networking sites.

I can’t wait until they add more.

Added Note: One thing about Socialite that I wish I could change is the linking. Since Twitter only allows for 160 characters anything over a certain amount is redirected to another service such as tinyurl. I don’t want to show tinyurl links on my posts because people might think it is a worm or some other type of post and not go there. I’m hoping there is a change or some sort of work around similar to Akra’s Shorter Links modification. I’ll keep you updated if it works.