Twitter has become one of the most important marketing channels for publishers. Consumers want to learn about new material, reviews and recommendations from people that share common interests -Twitter has become the perfect platform for this type of engagement.
Twitter can be integrated into your marketing activity for your publications through a number of ways, integration to your website is one of these ways.
Integrating Twitter into a website
Our site 3dissue.com attracts people looking solutions to digitise their publications. These visitors want to know: ‘How are other publishers using 3D Issue software?’ ‘What do their publications look like?’ ‘How do they incorporate interactivity?’ ….. They want examples, real publications created using 3D Issue.
Aside from our showcase of samples, we wanted to show visitors to our site a ‘live samples’ feed – so a Twitter widget was implemented. The Twitter widget searches all the latest tweets from Twitter users and groups together any tweet with a link to a digital publication created using 3D Issue. This widget is placed on the website so visitors can then view ‘live’ samples that have recently been created and released by our customers.
This got us thinking – you too can easily implement a twitter widget to post live updates on your website. You could create a widget displaying….
- Reader comments and reviews about your latest edition
- Comments about an event your publication/company was recently involved with
- Your most recent Twitter updates
- Who’s reading and promoting your publications
4 simple steps to create a Twitter widget?
1. Visit the Twitter Goodies page
Twitter has a number of tools in their goodies page making this process very simple. Visit the Twitter ‘widgets’ page – http://twitter.com/goodies/widgets and select ‘My Website’
2. Select which type of widget
Select the type of widget. For example a ‘search’ widget will allow you to stream tweets containing a defined term – perhaps the title of your publication, or if you want to show a ‘who’s reading our latest edition?’ stream, the url of the digital publication. A profile widget on the other hand will display your most recent Twitter updates.
3. Customize
- Search info
Input the search term, then title and caption to appear on the widget
- Preferences
Select a max number of tweets, whether timestamps should be included and other preferences
- Appearance
Choose the colour of background, text and links
- Dimensions
Set the width and height of the widget so it can fit perfectly within an area of your webpage
4. Insert the widget code into your website
Insert the widget code into your websiteTwitter takes the information you have defined in the customization part and creates the code for this. Simply select the button ‘Finish and Grab code’ button, copy the code and then paste this within any html web page. Then upload the webpage to your site.
