Twitter Account Syndication Made Simple

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Twitter Account Syndication MadeSimpleBy Tom Muir on October 20th, 2009

So, you have your company Twitter account or accounts and youare managing them competently with Cotweet or Hootsuiteand your departments are tweeting about the right stuff. ( Seeprevious post ). But how to make the best of your Twitter output?How to show off your accounts so they get followed by the rightpeople inside and outside you business?

This is the first part of our simple guide to Twitter syndication. Itwill show you how easy it is to embed feeds into your company'sweb pages. The second part will look specifically at putting theminto your WebAdvantage® site.

The simplest way of syndicating is to insert a link to a Twitteraccount which says "Follow us on Twitter" or "Follow our ChemicalDivision's tweets". There are any number of free Twitter icons youcan incorporate in this link - have a look at the free giveaway iconsat Smashing Magazine . A simple link like that might just suityour style. However it is much more eye-catching to give peoplea taste of what they would be getting if they followed you - livecontent which refreshes regularly always being a good draw.

The first thing to do is to find and save the RSS feed for each ofyour Twitter accounts. Go to the profile page of of the account andlook at the bottom of the right sidebar as illustrated below. Thereyou will see the link to the RSS feed for your tweets.

Click on it an you will see something like this:

Bookmark, or copy & paste the URL from the address bar to a safeplace for future reference.

The next thing to do is put the feed in a badge or widget so itcan be embedded in a webpage. These are kinds of miniature feed-reeders which can be easily incorporated in the HTML of a webpage.There are many different services which will generate widgets forfree, and blogs have their own gadgets for putting RSS feeds inthe sidebar. In Blogger , for example, click on 'Customise' >'Add a Gadget'; then scroll down until you find 'Feed' > click '+' >'Configure' > choose options > 'Save' and you get something likeours in your sidebar, which has conformed to the 'style' of the blog.Scroll down this blog until you see it in the right sidebar.

However, that is Google doing it for you. In an ordinary webpage youneed to use one of the free services already mentioned to generatethe code for you. My preference is for Yahoo Pipes , about whichI have already blogged . It may seem a bit 'OTT' to use Pipesfor a single feed, but I like their customisable badges, and besides,Pipes is very useful for doing more complicated things with yourfeed(s), as I will demonstrate below, so it is right and proper to doeverything in the same style.

Imagine you have four or five departmental Twitter accounts. Youmight like the idea of showing them off by putting them on yourhome page as a single feed, sorted into publication date order.Visitors to your site would see that different posts were generatedby different accounts and when they clicked on an individual postthey would be taken to the particular generating Twitter account.This can be done very easily with Yahoo Pipes.

Here is a snapshot of the four merged Twitter feeds I made at YahooPipes:

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The top four modules gather the Twitter RSS feeds; then 'Union'does what it says and puts them into a single feed. If you have morethan five feeds to merge you will need to use an extra 'Union'. In theunlikely event you have more than nine, you will have to use a third,and so on. The new single feed is then piped through a 'Sort' module- in this case set to present the posts in publication time/date order.

If you would like to make your own version, save a clone of myPipe , which I have made public, and then modify to suit yourTwitter feeds.

To put the result in a webpage, click on 'Get as a badge',then 'Embed',

and copy & paste the generated script into your page, where itwill pick up the style of the page for body text and links etc.

Next time I will look at putting Twitter feeds in a WebAdvantage®site.