Tooltip and popover are NOT only-css plugins like dropdown or progressbar. To use tooltips and popover, you MUST to activate them using jquery (read javascript).
So, lets say we want a popover to be shown on click of an html button.
button
Then you need to have following javascript code to activate popover:
$('.popovers-to-be-activated').popover();
Actually, above javascript code will activate popover on all the html elements which have class "popovers-to-be-activated".
Needless to say, put the above javascript inside DOM-ready callback to activate all popovers as soon as DOM is ready:
$(function() {
// Handler for .ready() called.
$('.popovers-to-be-activated').popover();
});