Why should you care that Twitter has widgets that allow you to display your updates on your own website? Because cross-pollination of your social media efforts is a top priority. Why stand on three street corners when you can do the same thing on one? Why wouldn’t you want to gain more contacts from your blog by letting them know what you’re up to on Twitter?
This column was originally published here on AgentGenius.com on July 24, 2009.
This isn’t just another widget. Most widgets are static meaning they don’t move and they don’t update unless you update the page. This particular widget developed by Twitter.com first hand scrolls updates live on your sidebar and is fully customizable (text, colors, and size).
You have two widgets to choose from so far and you can use both. Use the “profile widget” to show website visitors your twitter updates and use the “search widget” to display all tweets from all users about whatever search term you deem worthy- your brand, your name, your city, etc.
Search Widget
So above, you can tell your widget what to search for as well as alter how you present it (you don’t HAVE to use the existing title text). Below, you can see how to adjust colors of the widget.
Below is a screenshot of how easy it is to get the embed code for the sidebar of your website and voila, a simply copy and paste job and you’re up and running.
Profile Widget
The setup is the same as the search widget but displays results of everything you’ve said. The only downside is that profile widgets are not compatible with private twitter accounts. Here’s what it looks like (remember, you can change the size and all colors):
Ideas for Search Widget
There are infinite options for the search widget and you’re allowed to search for multiple terms, like your name, your brokerage, your city or an event/conference you’re attending. What search term do YOU think real estate agents should use for a sidebar widget for live twitter searching?
Sadly, AgentGenius.com is not affiliated with Twitter.com
tomferry
July 24, 2009 at 2:50 pm
I like the profile widget best. We’re going to change to that from what we have currently (Tweetboard). I am not seeing any interaction on it, so I think what you’re suggesting is a better idea!
Thx Lani
Erion Shehaj
July 24, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Love the idea of a self-updating widget in real time… One use I could definitely see for hyperlocal real estate blogs, is to display a search widget for neighborhood related keywords i.e. “Rice Military”
Chuck G
July 24, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Lani —
THANK YOU for the great tip — I didn’t realize that Twitter updated their widgets. I was using one of their older ones, and these are much better. I also like the ability to post a Twitter search on the area that is germane to one’s blog. Just another great way to “keep it local.”
Chuck
Norm Fisher
July 25, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Thanks Lani,
I love the simple look of the widget and it certainly is easy to customize. I noticed though that the profile widget seems to link my profile picture to a user by the name of “undefined.” It did that on my page and I notice it’s doing the same on Chuck’s. I can’t find any setting to affect that.
Chuck G
July 26, 2009 at 9:16 am
Ouch…Good catch, Norm. I also am not crazy about how it lists the tweets in reverse chronologic order (i.e. oldest to newest) It’s counter-intuitive to how everything else is presented on a blog. You just expect the newest tweet to be at the top, and the oldest at the bottom.
Good thing I saved the code of my old Twitter widget 😉
Lani Rosales
July 26, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Norm, Chuck: try uninstalling then reinstalling it and see if that helps. Erion had problems too but reinstallation seemed to fix it.
As for loading, it typically loads the newest first then that scrolls to the bottom, so I think the thought behind it is that when a page loads, they see the newest tweet up top (also, if they did it backward, readers would never see the most recent tweets, especially for someone like me with thousands of updates).
Let me know if it works for you guys, I’m surely interested!
Sal Antsipenka
July 26, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Here is the deal, guys. Social media game is important, but after a very close scrutiny of my real estate business competition and just real estate websites in general I have found out that most websites which reached number one, two and three position in important local key word searches, say “Naples real estate” in my situation, used popular blogs like Activerain, AgentGenius, Inman News. In case of ActiveRain they published at least one article a day for 6 or more months and commented very heavily on other blogs. Next most important thing is the website. Most agents make a mistake of having just a couple of pages and then search as the most important feature of the website. However, most successful and competitive real estate websites have thousands of CONTENT pages. How can you achieve that? Quite simple. Have a page for a community and then individual page for every subdivision in this community with subdivision name in the URL extension. That’ll give you a lot of pages. One more important SEO “must” is press releases and articles – at least three a week in at least 5 PR sources. It’s a lot of work, but trust me, much more effective than just Twitter. By the way, if you are looking to get a lot of quality followers on Twitter, upload as many real estate themed videos on YouTube as you can and hook them up to Twitter. Works as charm.
dzynz
September 6, 2009 at 6:23 pm
I tried to display two different profile widgets on one page of my website, and no matter how I table it, separate the code, they turn into this homogonized mess of only one display. If I use the blog-style ones on the website, they load separately as intended, but they’re harder to load on the page. Frustrating!