How to Make Content Portable: Embedded Tweets

Social content services like YouTube and SlideShare for years now have allowed companies to make content more shareable by setting it free from the shackles of the corporate web site domain.

If there is one area where social services have focused on terms of adding features it’s content portability. Making content portable should be a part of every content marketing strategy. This post kicks off a series on how to use some of the newer ones available with ideas and recommendations for use cases.

The Embedded Tweet

I’ll kick off the series with the Embedded Tweet. This was introduced with “New New Twitter” late last year. It was the most unheralded new feature, and in my opinion, most underutilized. Perhaps it’s because the vast majority of people use Twitter through clients like TweetDeck or mobile apps, and this is only available through Twitter.com.

Here’s what one looks like. Notice how it is live so that readers can interact engage without leaving the page. This includes replying to the tweet, retweeting, marking a tweet as a favorite or following the person who published the tweet.

HubSpot finds correlation b/w 3rd-party Facebook posts & huge EdgeRank drop-off: bit.ly/HCzBkg

— Justin Kownacki (@JustinKownacki) April 2, 2012

Prior to this, if you want to share a tweet or Twitter conversation, you were limited to linking to a tweet, or taking a screen shot. Other options include using the various Twitter buttons or widgets, but this either is too limited to what you want to share or too broad.

Embedding tweets is a matter of grabbing HTML code and pasting it to your HTML editor, but getting this code is not intuitive, so here’s how to do it.

1. Find your tweet to embed

You’ll have to go to Twitter.com for this. You can navigate there by clicking on the timestamp link in a Twitter client, going to the stream either of the person who published the tweet or find the tweet in your own stream. Once your there, hover over the tweet you want to embed and you will see the option to open it.

2. Click “Details” to get to the permalinked tweet.

3. Click “Embed this Tweet”

4. Grab HTML code.

Choose the justification for the object and copy the HTML code. Then drop the code where you want the embedded tweet to appear on your web page in the HTML editor.

Clever Uses of the Embedded Tweet

The embedded tweet can be used anywhere HTML code can be added to a web page or e-mail template. The possibilities are numerous, but here are a few ways that embedded tweets can be used.

sPress Release

The “social media press release” seems to have lost its momentum, but the embedded tweet is a way to revive it. As soon as a press release is published on your newsroom and you post a tweet to share the news with your followers, embed the HTML code for it in the middle of the release so that readers can spread the word and have a conversation about it.

Show Conversation in Blog Post

The most effective blog posts spark conversation not only via comments but on social networks like Twitter as well. Why not bring those conversations back to your blog, especially if they spark a follow-on post. New readers can jump into the dialogue by replying or retweeting.

Enhance a Contest Landing Page

Most social media contests are run by posing questions to a group of followers and asking them to reply with an answer or retweeting. These contests also usually have blog posts or landing pages on company web sites with rules. The embedded tweet now allows participants to “enter” without leaving a landing page and also seeing the extent others are responding, which may prompt more participation.

How have you used embedded tweets? What ideas have worked well?