Integrate Twitter with your Website

If you are using Twitter to help market your small business, what is your strategy?
Here is an article that may help you think this through:
An Actual Non Big Brand Twitter Case Study

The rest of this article describes the various Twitter integration plugins and options we support for OM4 websites.

Simple Twitter Link

Choose a Twitter button, right click it to download to your hard disk.
Then go to your own website and use Dashboard, Media, Add New to upload the button to your website.

You’ll need to use an image link to place the button in your website. You can either learn how to create image links yourself, or alternatively:

  • use Dashboard, Pages, Add New to create a temporary page
  • click the Add an Image icon and upload your image
  • set the File URL to your twitter handle (e.g. http://twitter.com/glennnicholas/) and set Align to None
  • click to insert the image into your page
  • switch to HTML view and copy the HTLM for the image
  • discard the page (you just used it to create

Twitter

If you want a Twitter link in your sidebar, go to Dashboard, Appearance, Widgets, drag a new Text Widget into your sidebar, paste your Twitter image link into the widget and click Save.

Twitter Integration

You can use Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin to create a blog post from each of your tweets (or a daily/weekly digest), create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, or post a tweet from your sidebar.

First of all use Dashboard, Plugins to activate Twitter Tools (if you don’t have an OM4 website, download and install the plugin first).

When you go to activate the plugin, you’ll see you have a few options listed under Twitter Tools – just activate the first plugin (Twitter Tools itself).

Configuration

You have a number of options for configuring your Tweets.

The first and most important configuration step is to enter your Twitter username and password and click the Test Login Info button to make sure you are connecting.

Click to enlarge

You can try out the other options to get the level of integration you are after.

Displaying your Tweets

Method 1: Sidebar – Go to Dashboard, Appearance, Widgets and drag your Twitter widget in to your sidebar.

Method 2: Shortcode – use the Twitter Tools shortcode in any page or post (switch to HTML mode before entering it).