Internet Marketing Blog
How to Integrate Twitter into your Website
Twitter has become incredibly popular. One great ways Twitter allows you to use their service is to integrate it into your website. There are great tools for getting your website users to become your twitter followers and vice versa. Here’s a few useful ones that I’ve played around with before and am happy to share with others.
The first one I have to mention as it is officially provided by Twitter. They have what they call Twitter Widgets. You get to choose if you want to put it directly on one of your social profiles or if you would like to put it somewhere else (such as your website). This widget system allows users to put their Twitter updates on somewhere other than their main Twitter feed. This greatly increases visibility of your Twitter updates to those who might find it interesting.
If you are looking for a quick way for people browsing your website to follow you without much thought then you probably are looking for something similar to a Twitter Button. This is useful for someone who is visiting your website and realizes that they share a common interest or find what you have to say particularly interesting. They will then be able to click on a simple button and start following you on Twitter.
Another way to integrate Twitter is to allow users to share your website with others by making a Tweet. TwitThis is a service that allows you to put a button on your website that, when clicked, will instantly ready a Tweet with a link back to the website they were at. It really is instant sharing, and that does great things in terms of visibility.
These aren’t all of the tools that are available for integrating Twitter, because there are more and more popping up as time goes on. I just wanted to cover the most basic ones out there, because the simple ones are often the most effective. It’s a combination of website design and social media marketing that helps improve the number of followers you have and the amount of interest for your website. Happy Tweeting.
Kurt
Internet Marketing Group
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Website Design Cedar Rapids
January 15, 2009
Twitter in 2008: 752% Growth
Twitter has been an incredibly interesting startup company to pay attention to and still is. When the service was initially gaining popularity it was plagued with frequent downtime, and that made it difficult for it to maintain a constant growth in users. Those problems have been fixed for a while now and twitter has been allowed to grow without technical limitations holding it back. The end of 2008 resulted in 752% growth from the end of 2007.
Starting 2008 with 500,000 unique monthly visitors and ending with 4.43 million unique monthly visitors is very impressive. There has been additional interest when some popular people with mainstream attention started to use twitter, and even some fakers that imitate famous people (they are usually entertaining to read). Barack Obama had a strong following on twitter during the 2008 election and used it as a method to reach people across the world that wanted to stay up to date on the election, but has since stayed inactive during the transition period of entering the white house.
While listening to the radio, I heard a commercial that mentioned that they were on twitter. There are restaurants that have a note on their menu mentioning that they’ve joined twitter. It provides great exposure and gives people who have interest in what you have to say with what they want. Twitter is something to continue to watch as more and more people and companies join and start using it. More and more companies are building it into their website design using twitter’s great widgets. It is such a barebones concept that it has the potential to become something huge.
Kurt
Internet Marketing Group
Other Topics of Interest:
Website Design Cedar Rapids
December 11, 2008
How to Use Tags Properly In Blogs
When writing a blog you probably use categories, tags, or both to help organize your content you are publishing out to the web. Without these organizational structures the content you write about can become nearly impossible to manage. Many times this happens only because there is not enough emphasis on planning and organizing your content you write about.
Categories are used to simply break up your content into identifiable selections. No matter what organizational system you use, categories can be utilized as a simple single-teir level of organization. It will help readers filter through the information you provide.
Tagging has become popular with the development of Web 2.0. Social Media Sites like del.icio.us, Flickr, and Technorati have taken advantage of it, but it has also provided bloggers with another simple organizational structure. Tags to a certain extent can be used to replace searching, if done well. For example, if I’m interested in posts about Social Media Marketing. Will I get better results by searching and having every post that has ever mentioned Social Media Marketing returned to me, or by clicking a tag and only seeing the posts which have been specifically tagged as discussing Social Media Marketing?
Things to remember when using tags:
- Use the same tags over and over again. The tagging system is useless when your tags vary. The important this is to choose one, and reuse it on every post you write on that topic.
- Your tags should consist of only one or two words
- Tags can help search engines so use specific keywords
When you are writing your posts make sure you tag the important keywords. This way you will be more easily searched in the search engines and people will be able to find you and the good information you are sharing.
Kristi Kleiner
Internet Marketing Group Blog
Other Topics of Interest:
Website Design Cedar Rapids
December 4, 2008
Pownce is Shutting Down and Joining Six Apart
The Social Media Site Pownce is shutting down as of December 15th. Pownce has been aquired by the blogging company Six Apart. They are the makers of Movable Type, TypePad and Vox.
What is Six Apart? they provide the tools that have helped reinvent the web as a more social, more connected place. In the past few years millions of bloggers have changed the face of media, communications and society. Six Apart believes in the power of blogging and have made the most powerful and expressive plateforms available such as: Movable Type, TypePad, Vox, Blogs.com and TypePad AntiSpam.
Pownce has built in a export tool so you can export all your posts and comments. They have suggested switching over to a new blogging site called Vox. Its a free blogging service and you will be able to upload all of your posts and comments from Pownce. In Vox you will be able to build an online neighborhood of people with the same intersts as you. Vox has an easy to use built-in-editor, so you’ll be able to combine your words with images and videos. This is just another great place to spread your knowledge about your business and what you do.
Kristi Kleiner
Internet Marketing Group Blog
Other Topics of Interest:
Website Design Cedar Rapids
Social Media Marketing
December 2, 2008
Edit Quickly With Picasa
If you’re a casual blogger, or photographer, or just needing to trim a photo, you might have run in to the fleeting “now what” after getting your images uploaded to your hard drive. Just envisioning trying to attach them to an email and send them where they need to go can induce a headache.
If you want to crop, rotate, scale, or color your images easily on a PC without using a bloated image editor, you’ve been in the rough for a few years. Luckily, Google has stepped up with a straightforward option.
Picasa is a deceptively powerful desktop image editor. Unlike a lot of niche programs, it doesn’t create duplicate files or folders but stores information in a single file alongside your photos.
When you first open Picasa, it will find all of the images on your hard drive, and then display them in a lightweight, organized, and easily-searchable manner. From the thumbnails, you can then choose photos to edit.
Highlights of the editing options include cropping, coloring, scaling, red-eye removal, retouching, rotating, lighting, and adding text. The program also lets you easily create fun and useful things like collages, multi-page posters, and web galleries.
An increasingly needed functionality that makes Picasa even more useful is it’s ability to upload and share to your Google albums right from the application. It’s functional in efficiency, painless in usability, and straightforward in design.
Clarissa
Internet Marketing Group Blog
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