I am a big fan of marketing integration. Your offline marketing makes reference to your online marketing, your online marketing ties together with real world promotion, and everything links to everything else. This includes your social networking. One of my favorite techniques for combining blog content and static web page content is to stream the blog to the static pages via RSS. Sometimes it can be tricky to work out the code to make it happen, but it’s a beautiful effect when your entire web site gets updated every time you make a new blog post.
In keeping with that tradition, I am now exploring the idea of streaming your Twitter content to your web pages. Fortunately, there is really no code to figure out, although you may have to do some in-line styling to get it to look right. To use it, first log into your Twitter account, then visit the following URL:
http://twitter.com/downloads
You can also get there by clicking the “Apps” link at the bottom of the page. To stream your Twitter posts, click the Widgets link. Then select the type appropriate for your site. You can create a Flash-based widget, or one that is HTML-based. I suggest going with straight up HTML because, for search engine purposes, you really want to have the actual words from your Twitter posts on your web pages, rather than a Flash movie.
Then just copy and paste the supplied code into your web pages. At this point, it is also VERY helpful if your site makes use of include files. For example, our law firm Internet marketing site, www.law-firm-internet-marketing.net, uses an include file for the left side of the pages, which looks like this:
#include virtual=”leftside.asp”
So when I want to update the left-hand side of the web pages on the site, all I have to do is change this one file, rather than manually updating every single web page.
Initially, the design of the widget did not look right on my pages, so I used some in-line styling, as shown:
ul id=”twitter_update_list” style=”list-style-type: none;”
I did not like the way the bullet points looked, so I inserted the style code to tell viewers’ browsers not to display bullet points by telling it the list style type is “none.”
New widgets are coming out all the time, and we will discuss some more, but if I were you, the first one I would look into using is the Twitter widget that lets you stream your Twitter posts onto your web site.
Need some help using social networking to promote your web site? Contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.