As Twitter continues its meteoric rise, millions of people are discovering that it allows them to find quality information and resources that are relevant to their needs.
It’s like a massive human-edited search engine. Twitter is also an extremely meritocratic environment. Quality users and content are rewarded, while poor users and content aren’t.
When popular users provide a link to a relevant resource that link is visited more often and retweeted more often.
So if you’ve developed a good reputation on Twitter and publish high-quality content, it’s possible to bring the two together, providing great value for your followers and additional traffic for your website.
There are several powerful tools that allow you to integrate your Twitter account with your website, blog, email list and other social media pages.
These tools will automatically update your webpages whenever you post a new Tweet and allow visitors to promote webpages on your behalf.
So with that in mind, here are 8 of the best tools and services that will allow you to join the mashup revolution.
Adding Your Tweets To Your Website
Twitter Tool 1: Twitter Widgets
If you want a simple way to display your latest tweets on your site, the first tool to consider is the official widgets offered by Twitter.They’re simple to install (just copy and paste the code into your website template), can be added to almost any website or blog (including MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, Typepad) and will help to engage your readers with your Twitter updates without taking up too much space on your site.
Twitter Tool 2: Twitter Buttons
This is a quick and simple service that gives you access to more than 80 different Twitter button graphics. Just enter your Twitter username, select the design that you want, then copy and paste the custom code into your website to help turn your website traffic into new Twitter followers.Twitter Tool 3: Chirrup
Chirrup is a simple idea with a lot of potential if you want to integrate Twitter with your website. It allows you to display all of the messages that are sent to your Twitter account and sort them by url, which means you can use Twitter to run a comment feed system for each page on your site.The major advantages of Chirrup are the ease of installation (just add a short snippet of Javascript to your site), ease of customization (you can organize the data and the look of the output exactly as you want) and the ability to use it on any site, whether it’s a blog or a static html page. All you need is a hosting package that supports php.
Integrating Your Twitter Account With Facebook
Twitter Tool 4: Twitter Facebook Application
This application allows you to link your Facebook account to your Twitter feed. Just login to your Facebook account, click the link to the application above, then select to add it to your Facebook page. Once installed, this application will automatically update your Facebook status every time you post a new tweet.Integrating Your Twitter Account With Your Wordpress Blog
Twitter Tool 5: Twitter Tools
One of the best Twitter integration scripts is the excellent Twitter Tools by Alex King. If you have a Wordpress blog this powerful Wordpress plugin offers several ways to connect your blog and Twitter account, including;a) Automatically update your Twitter account with a link to your latest blog post
b) Automatically create a new blog post whenever you post a new tweet
c) Automatically create a blog post with a daily digest of all the tweets you have posted in the last 24 hours
d) Post tweets from the sidebar of your blog
e) Post tweets from your Wordpress admin area
f) Syndicate your tweets to other services using an API hook
Helping Twitter Users To Promote Your Content
Twitter Tool 6: TwitThis
TwitThis provides you with a short piece of code that you can add to the html of your site or blog template (they also offer a wordpress plugin). The code adds a small TwitThis button graphic to your site that allows your visitors to share your page with their Twitter followers.When your visitors click on the button, it automatically shortens the website address then allows them to add their own description before posting the message to their followers.
Due to the growing popularity of Twitter, a brief mention by a couple of trusted Twitter users can send an avalanche of traffic to your site. And if some of them use the TwitThis button, the viral marketing effect will start to gather pace.
Twitter Tool 7: Tweet This
If you have a wordpress blog, Tweet This provides the same type of service as TwitThis but offers greater customization flexibility. This is a great plugin, and one that we personally use on this site (take a look at the top right of each post).Once you’ve got the plugin installed on your blog, you can alter the way the button looks from within the Wordpress admin area without having to spend too much time wading through the template code. This is a major advantage if that sort of thing brings you out in a cold sweat.
Tweet This provides a quick and easy way for your blog visitors to share your content with their Twitter followers. One click posts the title of the blog post and a shortened url to their Twitter status box. A second click will post it to their Twitter account.
But beyond the obvious viral promotion benefits of this service, Tweet This provides two additional benefits;
a) Social Proof
If you use one of the default images provided by Tweet This, the system generates two links next to each blog post. A green “Retweet” link and a grey box that shows the number of times that the post has been retweeted.
This provides your blog with a massive promotional benefit - Social Proof
In general, people are more likely to share content that is already popular. So if your visitors see that your latest blog post has already been retweeted 200 times, they are more likely to share it with their followers than if the post had 0 retweets.
Why?
Because it provides a measure of proof regarding the quality of content on your blog and the quality of each specific post. Success breeds success. The more retweets your posts get, the more likely they are to receive additional retweets.
b) Subtle Market Research
Tweet This is also a great way to gauge the popularity of the content on your blog.
Okay, you can use Google Analytics and your website stats, but that only tells you half the story.
You can find out how many people have visited each page and even how long they spend on it, but all that data won’t tell you what people thought of the content on your blog.
It doesn’t tell you which pages people are prepared to risk their social reputation to share with their followers.
So unless people post comments on your blog, you won’t have any positive feedback on the type of information that your website visitors find valuable.
The retweet counter provides you with powerful feedback on the type of content that motivates your visitors to read and then share. That type of information is like gold dust as it will provide ideas for future blog posts that are likely to be in high demand.
Linking Twitter To Your List Of Email Subscribers
Twitter Tool 8: Aweber
Thanks to a feature-rich platform that’s constantly improving and an incredible deliverability rate, Aweber is best known for being the leading email marketing service. It’s an essential part of any newsletter publishing or list building activity.However, Aweber now has the ability to integrate directly with your Twitter account. When you setup a broadcast email, there is a section towards the foot of each page that allows you to select the syndication options.
Just make sure that the “Publish in RSS/XML feed or html archive” box is checked, the “Twitter Update” box is checked and your Twitter login details are entered (they will be stored securely by Aweber).
When your email is broadcast, Aweber will use your Twitter login details to post a short message to your Twitter account, which will consist of the subject line you chose for your email and an Aweber tracking link to an html archive version of the email.
If you have a email list or plan to start one, this is a quick and easy way to attract additional subscribers from your Twitter followers. It’s also a good way to provide significant value for your Twitter followers.
Please Note: If you intend to use this technique, it’s a good idea to include a link to your subscription squeeze page at the foot of your broadcast email so that anyone who reads the html version linked to in your Twitter message will find it easy to subscribe to future newsletters.
What Twitter integration tools do you use? If there are any Twitter integration tools that you recommend, we’d love to hear from you.
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