Marketing Director

Embed Twitter and Facebook on your website or blog

Here Comes Everybody is a great book by Clay Shirky. It's all about how everyone can be a publisher and producer now. If this guy can anyone can. A lot of people want to know about embedding elements of Facebook and Twitter into a web page or blog in non-technical speak, so here goes...

The Short Answer:
These options can create dynamic content on your site whether embedding a relevant Twitter search window (as below) or placing Facebook widgets into your page to link to many different elements of Facebook it's easy to be a cut and paste coder and it can help you cross promote and show visitors what your 'community' looks like. Be sure to watch design and keep things clean and manageable for visitors. My site for example has far too many links and text unrelated to the main body and too many widgets, but I like information ;)


The Longer Answer:
I have created a document  about how to embed Facebook badges or elements and embedded it at the end of this post or download or view it online here on Slideshare (one of my favourite web tools for storage and display). The easiest way to embed Facebook elements is through their Facebook Widget site it's great and easy  to use. You can also check out my earlier post previewing Facebook Widgets it's from September 2009 when they were first released, so check the Facebook widget site for what's new.

If you want to put something like the "Follow Me On Twitter" badge, or the Retweet button or Share/AddThis bar at the top of the post you will need to know how to either cut and paste code or put an image on your page and link it. You can use a service like Twitter Buttons or click the above links for the respective tool.

Twitter Widgets: It wasn't easy to find them but here is the link. I strongly recommend you check out Twitter's Widget offerings first before trying the ways listed below:


Twitter's widgets are awesome and totally customizable. I am showing the Profile widget in the right column on the blog and the Search Widget is displayed below with a few tweaks and a custom search:



Tweetizen: The directions are straight forward and allow multiple types of embeds. Tweetizen offers a number of options to customize what appears on your page and can include searches or tweets from specific people. It's a good tool but doesn't have the all-out customization of Twitter's Gadgets.

How to embed Facebook onto your webpage or blog:





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