There are many sites which will tell you all about the advantages of Twitter and why you should use it. Here we look at HOW you can get your tweets onto your website or get people to tweeting about you.
There are a vast number of applications and plugins of varying complexity and functionality, here we look at some of the options available.
1. Twitter Widget
The simplest way to add Twitter into your website is to use the widget created by Twitter itself. Its as simple as going to www.twitter.com/widgets and then copy & paste the code provided into your website. Choose from:
- Profile Widget: Shows your recent Twitter updates.
- Search Widget: Displays search results based on your settings. Such as: messsages mentioning your company name, trending topics, messages directed at yourself and more.
- Favourites Widget: Displays all your favourite tweets. Perfect if you want more control over what is displayed.
You can alter the appearance (size and colours) and set how many tweets to show at once, but much more customisation is not possible.
2. Follow Me…
Advertise to your customers that you are on Twitter. There are many websites that provide Twitter follow buttons which you can simply add to your website with a link to your profile.
www.twitterbuttons.com even provides you with a variety of buttons to choose from and even automatically creates the code needed to embed it into your website!
3. TweetMeMe & TwitThis Retweets
These both provide your users with an easy way to tweet about your website, blog post, competition or whatever you wish. Simply add the code they provide to the page on your website, WordPress users have the option of using a plugin for either of these. More info:
http://help.tweetmeme.com/2009/04/06/tweetmeme-button/
http://twitthis.com/tools
4. jQuery Plugins
jQuery is a JavaScript library that provides a lot of functionality for your website. There are several plugins that make use of this library, check out:
TwitStream. Displays a list of recent tweets containing a particular keyword from your twitter stream. http://iamnoahcooper.com/TwitStream/
Juitter. A nicely customisable option that allows you to show tweets of your choice (to/from a user or by keyword). It has a live mode which can display the latest tweets (by use of Ajax). http://juitter.com/
5. WordPress Plugins
WordPress users have a large selection of Twitter plugins to choose from. Our top 2 are:
TweetSuite. This allows you to add twitter comments to your blog (along with your usual comments), auto update Twitter with blog posts and add retweet and tweet this buttons to your blog.
TwitterTools. This is a fairly extensive Twitter plugin, allowing you to create a blog post containing your daily / weekly tweets. Tweet when you post a new blog (with links) and post tweets from your blog.