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A lot of people are Twittering. But how many are using the Twitter Apps to add feeds to your website? If you’re not, you’re missing out on an excellent opportunity. You can even have multiple Twitter accounts for different personalities. Let me explain.
Let’s say you’re looking for a quick way to add personalized updates to your website. Did you know you can add a Twitter update feed right into your site using the Twitter Apps? Look at your current website and figure where would be a good place to have a small Twitter feed added to the page, or another separate page in your site. The feed will be a small square whose length is dependent on the number of feed items you choose to have shown at one time without scrolling. Keep this space in mind. Now let’s go to Twitter and get our feed.
Located at the bottom of the page in Twitter, is a menu item called Apps. Clicking on this will take you to a page with many little programs called widgets that you can add to various websites. By selecting the very first widget, the one offered by Twitter, you can then select the HTML option on the next page and pick next. Then you can select how many Twitt feeds you want displayed at one time and what if any title you want. Don’t worry that you have more than the number of Twitts shown in your account. It just means the rest will be available with a scroll bar that is automatically added to the feed widget. The result will be code that Twitter offers you to copy into your clipboard. Once you have copied the code, you are ready to past it into your site.
If you do your own websites like I do, you simply figure out where you want the widget to be placed on your site. If you use one of those canned websites, you can probably use the code on them to. My company website is provided by e-Neighborhoods through my affiliation with RE/MAX. The default site had a nice little text box that was just sitting there not really helping my site or my site ranking. I simply replaced that static text box with my Twitter widget. You can see the results here http://barrett.powell.remax.com, and follow my postings on this site on Twitter under the name “barrettp”.
If you setup your Twitter account with your mobile phone, under the Devices tab on your Twitter settings, you can even send Twitter updates via your mobile phone. Because the feed is real-time, any updates sent via your phone show up immediately on your website now. Once I was sitting in a restaurant waiting on my order and remembered some bit of news I wanted on my website. I pulled out my Treo 700wx phone and posted the news on my Twitter account and it showed up right then on my website. How cool is that?
I like to post little short news headlines and then past the link to the full story in the post. As you know, Twitter will convert really long URLs into what it calls “tiny urls” so your post will fit the 240 character limit. So it’s a great place to post news about a new post in your larger Blog with the link to the full blog posting.
Now, let’s say like me, you’re looking for more of an advantage in your market. And 
let’s say like me, you have a fairly large market for “Green” type construction and homes. You could do like me and create another Twitter account that focuses just on topics of “Green” real-estate. In my case, my “Green” Twitter account is “GreenHomesandLand”. Not only are my topics focused on “Green”, but my Twitter theme reflects this “Green” branding as well. I even setup a separate website, http://www.GreenHomesandLand.net, which features links, resources, and even listings for my area that are Energy Star compliant and focus on “Green” living.
So get out there and start “Branding” yourself with customized Twitter feeds about your area and area of expertise. And don’t be afraid to have multiple Twitter personalities to cover the vertical real-estate markets, such as Green, or New Homes, or Retired Living, or whatever area you specialize in.
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