How embedding tweets can increase social interactivity

Embedding tweets in your blog

While many have been using Twitter for over half of a decade, others are just joining in and seeking ways to do more than just broadcast into an empty room. A common understanding of business professionals is that the best method for doing business is to get people into your store or into your office, where you can interact with them, as it is much more effective than doing so on a street corner or in a room crowded with competitors.

Online, getting people into your store is getting people to spend time on your website, and there is this magical intersection between blogging and tweeting. Sure, you should have your company’s tweets featured on the sidebar of your website so people can see that you are engaged, but there are other ways to engage, specifically inside of your blog content.

In 2010, Twitter launched a method for embedding (copying and pasting code from Twitter into a website) tweets, and we criticized the social network for overcomplicating the process and not offering interactivity. Since then, they have updated the embed options to make all tweets embedded into a blog or website to not only allow users to reply, retweet, or favorite that tweet from within the website, without having to leave the site and go to Twitter.

Hence, Twitter helps you keep people in your store. Below is an example of an embedded tweet, so you can see what it looks like and how you can interact with it:

To embed a tweet

If you see a tweet or have tweeted something you want to highlight on your blog, start a new blog post, then go to the specific tweet and click “Expand” as seen below:

The expanded version will take you to this view, click “Details”:

This will take you to the specific tweet you are seeking to showcase. Click “Embed this Tweet”:

Put your cursor on the code, select the entire string of words and copy it. Select what alignment you want (we recommend “center”):

Paste this code into your blog post HTML editor, and below is the final product:

Play with the above embedded tweet – try following, replying, favoriting, or retweeting to see what it looks like on the user’s end. By offering ways to keep people in your figurative store, you are showcasing any variety of information without forcing them to leave, and that alone is an often overlooked ingredient to increasing social interactivity.