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Facebook and Twitter are the giants of the social networking world, with huge amounts of traffic daily.  There are currently over 300 million active Facebook users and at least half log in every day.  Twitter records around 50million Tweets per day, which is an average of 600 per second.  Figures continue to rise daily.

These are vast quantities of traffic that any WordPress website just cannot afford to miss out on.  Connecting your site directly with Facebook and Twitter is the easiest way to tap into their potential.  People simply can’t be bothered to log in and out of different sites.  They want instant access to everything at the same time.  Connecting your website directly to these two sites allows visitors to post on your blog from their own Facebook and Twitter account.  It also allows them to invite their friends to your blog, and makes it easy for you to place your posts on all three.

Here is a list of plug ins which support the direct connection between your WordPress site and Facebook and Twitter:

• Gigya Socialize: this WordPress plug in allows your visitors to directly connect to your website from Facebook and Twitter, and bring their friends with them.  It also supports connections with MySpace, Google, Yahoo and AOL.  Users can then easily share your articles through Facebook notification, you can inform them of new posts through Newsfeeds as well as displaying MySpace and Facebook friends directly on your website.  One key feature of this plug in is the ability for users to invite their friends to share your articles as well as inviting their entire network to join your blog.  This makes it really easy to boost your traffic numbers within a short period of time, as long as you have good content that appeals to your readers.
• WP-Facebook Connect: another really useful plug in for providing full synchronicity between your Facebook and WordPress website.  Adding Facebook functionality to your site, you can post through your Facebook account, publish your latest comments via the newsfeeds and display Facebook profile photos as comments avatars.
• Facebook Dashboard Widget:  this widget is really simple to add to your sidebar and keeps you up to date on what your Facebook network are up to without having to log in.  You can then easily see when the right time is to make a comment, drop in an RSS feed or talk about your latest post or new product on your website.
• Twitter Feed: one of the easiest plug ins to connect with your Twitter account.  It puts your latest posts as RSS feeds on Twitter, updates your blog with recent Tweets and displays them in date and time order.  This is a great time saving plug in to prevent you having to log into all your separate accounts.
• Sociable: great for getting people to link your posts to their social networking accounts, with up to 99 different icons you can display after each post and page.  Sociable also goes one stage further by offering community features like inviting friends and highlighting recent visitors.
• Socialite: this is a really easy plug in to integrate your WordPress site with Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.  As soon as you create a new post, it’s automatically published on your accounts on these three social networking giants.