PubForge Blog

It took me a long time to warm up to Twitter. On first glance, it looked like a huge potential time-suck with little payback–one more social media platform to distract my audience from my main site. I’d see that question header “What are you doing?” and the answer was always the same–trying to figure out what this is good for. However, over time I began to see instances where it served my immediate needs as a web manager, and could serve my audience. A successful strategy to use Twitter will focus on places where those two converge.

Example 1: Tweeting the pledge drive

For years, my membership director had wanted a simple mechanism to project frequently-changing messages onto the home page during pledge drives–to update totals and new members, to promote special drawings and to point to special content. Twitter makes that easy, even in environments where non-web staff are not normally able to publish directly to the website. Here’s how:

1. Open a twitter account
2. Share log-in info with the person/people who will be posting. They can either post directly from the Twitter site (http://twitter.com/yourusername), or they can download a Twitter client such as twhirl that will allow them to post from their desktop or mobile device.
3. Log-in to Twitter. Select “Apps” from the menu at the bottom of the page. Select “Widgets” from the Applications page
4. Select “other” if the feed is going to display on your domain site.
5. Choose either the Flash widget or the HTML widget. (You can control the appearance of the HTML widget using CSS)
6. Copy the code for your selected widget and paste it into the page at your site where you want the feed to appear.

This same process could be used to make the home page available to a reporter covering a breaking news story, or to report quickly evolving content such as election returns.

Example 2: Syndicating existing news and blog content automatically via Twitter

Tweeting in real time is burdensome. However, you may have content from your site CMS and from blogs that can be automatically fed to Twitter via RSS feed. Here’s how (using twitterfeed):

1. Open a Twitter account
2. Open a twitterfeed account
3. Log in at twitterfeed and select “go to my twitter feeds (or create a new one)”
4. Select “Create new feed”
5. Enter your Twitter username and password, and the URL of the RSS feed you want to send to Twitter. For best results at Twitter, configure the feed to show title only, to include the item link, and to shorten the link address.
6. Select “Create”
7. Repeat 4-6 to include multiple feeds.

Each time a new item enters your RSS feed/s, a tweet will go out containing the headline and link.

Example 3: Aggregating your content from multiple sources into one location using Twitter

One of the disadvantages of the Web 2.0 environment is that it can fragment your content and your audience across many locations. You may have a main news site, several blogs, multiple comment mechanisms, a Facebook page, a Flickr photo-sharing account, etc. Twitter provides a simple mechanism that can bring all that content together back on your site. It employs a combination of examples 1 & 2 above. Here’s how:

1. Open a Twitter account (see Example 1. above)
2. Open a twitterfeed account
3. Add all the RSS feeds for the services you want to aggregate to twitterfeed (see Example 2. above)
4. Get a Twitter widget (see Example 1. above)
5. Paste the widget embed code where you want the aggregation to appear in your page.

Now, whenever anyone posts a news story, makes a blog post or comment, writes on your Facebook wall, uploads a photo, whatever–it will appear on your main site in a single location.