One of the common questions that I get with clients about Twitter (or social media tools in general) is “how does this make my life easier?” The question is a relevant one because we are all busy folks and adding another channel of advertising / marketing / PR doesn’t make our lives easier. On the contrary, it makes our lives more difficult as it presents another challenge that we have to work with.
So, here’s my small contribution on how to make your life easier using Twitter.
Like many companies, we run into issues with updating our website. Sure, our website is fully optimized, built on a content management system (CMS) and allows multiple content editors, but in the end, it is still quite an effort to update the home page to keep content fresh daily or weekly. Someone needs to be at their desk, log in, make the changes on the home page and log out. I hate to think we have to hire an intern just to update our website constantly. So we sat around and figure out how to keep our home page relevant and updated easily. Then we struck on the idea of using Tweeter as a way to update the home page. We use our Tweeter account to announce news about Evolution Point, or tell people about a new blog anyway. So why not use it to update those links on the home page?
Fortunately, Twitter allows you to do that. You can use their widget and place it on your home page. You can get their widget here:
http://twitter.com/widgets
The challenge is trying to put it on our home page without totally destroying the branding and design. I would recommend using the HTML version of the widget (not the Flash version). There are a couple of reasons for that – the first is that search engines does much better with text that Flash; the second is that there’s more design flexibility you can do with it. Using HTML , you can cull the widget using CSS to make it look like it’s part of your website. Take a look at our home page at http://www.evolutionpoint.com and you can see an example of what I mean.
What’s the net result? If I want to update the home page, I just need to send a tweet on our EvolutionPoint account using my phone and the home page gets updated. How much simpler does it get?
I hope this small tip can make your life a little easier. As always, if you have any questions about web development or social media, you can always contact us at info(at)evolutionpoint(dot)com.