While no longer the new kid on the block, Twitter has gained momentum. Users are limited to 280 characters. It’s a conversational platform for interacting with people. It’s used heavily at conferences and many choose this as a social network for really networking with peers and others in their community as well as people they might not ever meet in real life. You can follow as many people as you want and it’s a great way of having a stream of information about “what’s happening” with people and groups you’re interested in. One powerful development of Twitter is that celebrities embrace it as a way to speak directly to their fans without having the message interpreted through other media and journalism with a slant. The ability to search various topics or hashtags (keywords) and see a running stream of what people are saying about that topic is also a very powerful way of gauging reaction to ideas and events. It’s a great idea to experiment with a Twitter account by signing up, adding a profile picture and information about yourself, following a group of people, and interacting with it daily. While the gratification may not be immediate, it’s one of those social networks where the more you put into it the more you will get out of it.
Embedding a Tweet
In WordPress, you can embed a tweet into a blog post. The tweet will be automatically formatted to match what it looks like on Twitter. In addition, viewers of your blog can interact with an embedded tweet, and even “like” it if they are logged into their Twitter account.
Embedding a Twitter Timeline
WordPress allows users to embed their Twitter timeline directly into a website in the form of a widget. Widgets can be placed in several areas of a site, and are easy for viewers to see and interact with from the site’s front page.