Embedded Tweets For Enhancing Links in Websites.

Exploiting Twitter in Websites.

The easiest of the social media posts to embed in a website, I've found, generally speaking, is the good old tweet.

Lets suppose we have a blog post (say) we want to include a link to in a webpage. We could just have some text description and make a hyperlink out of it, as normal.

Now think about this alternative method. Suppose instead we first tweet the link itself, making sure it generates us a twitter card. Consider what this tweet will look like when fully expanded on twitter. If we click on the card or on the tweet itself, we go to the URL of the link, right? But it also contains the title, the snippet description and the visual hook graphic for the link too.

So now instead of a plain text hyperlink, lets exploit the above in the web page and embed this tweet-link in to the web page.  The image below shows how I have created four such embeds on my business website to create side-by-side links to posts from this very blog.

Tweet-links on a WordPress Website.

Now isn't that nicer than including all that info in the text? A nice visual and compact form which makes it more likely interested parties will click thru? But also, look, the tweet-link itself can gather followers too - a standard text link can't do that! Indeed, I've been a bit "clever" about this, because both my personal and my business twitter accounts are clickable in each one. There's still more. Did you notice that the share, reply and favorite buttons are right here too? This means we have made webpage links themselves individually interactive and shareable. Cool.

For WordPress.com websites, in particular, this is very easy to do and very controllable too. All I needed to do to create the scene above is add these shortcodes into the text of the page.

[tweet 623643127623065600 width='270' align='left']

[tweet 623584259996020736 width='270' align='left']

[tweet 623412855417778176 width='270' align='left']

[tweet 623134600794099712 width='270' align='left']

Nice!

Other webpages will differ, but usually its not hard to do.