Why Embed The New Twitter Timeline Widget?

embeddable twitter timeline widget Recently I wrote an article on Sensible Internet’s blog on how to embed twitter timelines. I think this widget has a lot to offer for businesses and bloggers everywhere, and thought I would write a quick article detailing some of the benefits the Timeline has to offer.

But before I go into that I just wanted to quickly bring something up first. When configuring your embeddable widget you are given the option to ‘opt-out of tailoring Twitter’, so what does this mean? Well, Twitter are now tracking which of their users visit websites with the embed code (that did not opt-out). This allows them to recommend Twitter users to follow based on shared browsing interests. So we can see what Twitter get out of the bargain, a lot more data to play with and more engagement and exposure from around the web. But what do businesses and bloggers get out of the bargain? Quite a lot actually.

Traditionally any kind of integrations like this either weren’t very interactive or required use of the Twitter API (meaning we had to ask permission to access the users account as an app). In either case it also took time to develop the required functionality. The new Twitter widget significantly reduces the time and friction involved in integrating Twitter with your website. Lets have a more detailed look at the reasons this is a win in my book:

Easy to Embed: Embedding the new Twitter timeline isn’t much more complicated than embedding a Youtube video. You fill in a form, copy the embed code, paste it into your blog and you are done! Simple right?See Tweets From Your Website: The new widget provides an easy solution to display Tweets from any user, users favourites, list or search on your website.Engage Without Leaving Your Website: One of the big advantages that the new Twitter timeline gives us is that our visitors can now engage with us on Twitter without ever leaving our website. Which brings me on to my next point:More Engagement with Less Friction: Our visitors can now reply to and retweet our tweets without ever leaving our websites or granting us any kind of permissions through Twitter. This is a huge step forward and massively lowers friction with regards to encouraging Twitter engagement from your website.

I hope this article helps you decide whether the new Twitter widget is a fit for your business. If you have any questions feel free to get in touch with me at any of my social media profiles listed below or in the comments section. Thanks for reading.