Adding Twitter to Your Website

“All tools have intrinsic politics and technology is the tool of now.” – Godfrey Reggio

For those of you who have followed my articles, you know by now one of my most common sayings is “maximize your efforts.” Before you do anything to promote yourself, your website, or your MLM products, compare the amount of effort you are putting in, to the potential size of the audience being reached. For you new guys that is what is meant by maximizing your efforts. If you are not using internet social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, you certainly are not maximizing your efforts. To give perspective, it would be like you building a house with your grandpa’s hammer while I build mine with my air compressor and nail guns. I’ll be sitting in air conditioned comfort while you’re still framing your bathroom. A truly successful MLM entrepreneur uses all the networking tools made available to him – Twitter is one of those tools.

Those of you who know me also know I like to back up my arguments or advice with real statistics and facts. I am certainly not promoting Twitter or any other source without giving you solid information. Take a look at these numbers in relation to Twitter and simply take a second and ask yourself – “Can this tool help me maximize my efforts?”

Here’s a summary of the facts and figures Twitter shared:

• Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users.
• New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day.
• 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month.
• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)
• Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API.
• Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day.
• Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day.
• Of Twitter’s active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet.
• Over half of all tweets (60 percent) come from third party applications.
• Twitter itself has grown: in the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees (1)

I think the obvious answer to the aforementioned question will be a resounding “YES, this certainly maximizes my efforts!” I will now explain how to add a Twitter feed Widget to your website. Not only will this feed allow visitors to your personal site view your latest “tweets”, it also affords them the option of electing to “follow” you. This will in turn, strengthen your “brand”.

Adding a Twitter feed Widget to your personal website is simple and can be completed following a few, easy steps.

1. The first and most obvious step will be to either already have a Twitter account or create one (Quite honestly, if you did not already know this, I want you to back away from the computer slowly, and walk away so you don’t hurt yourself).
2. Now for the other 99% go to Twitter.com/widgets and click on the “My Website” tab in the “Widgets For…” list.
3. You will now see options displayed such as “Profile Widget”, “Search Widget”, etc. Simply select the Widget you prefer.
4. Once you have chosen your option, you will see an example of how the feed will look. If you like click “Finish & Grab Code”.
5. Copy the code and open a page of where you modify your site.
6. I use WordPress, so the rest of the steps will be in relation to how to add a widget to it. If you are using another source, you can modify these instructions to make it work.
7. On your Dashboard, go to “Appearance” and click “Widgets”.
8. Scroll down to “TEXT” and drag to wherever you want the widget to appear on the page – the left or right are most aesthetic.
9. Title your Widget; I simply call mine Twitter Feed.
10. Paste your code and update your page. You may need to tweak the width of your widget. I adjusted mine from 250 down to 100 pixels and it fits fine. (check it out at fisher4success.com ).

In closing, never forget to always keep in mind – “Maximize efforts”. Adding a Twitter feed is a powerful tool that accomplishes this goal. You will literally spend less than 10 minutes setting it up and maybe a minute a day “tweeting”. Over time, you will generate an ever-growing following that will generate leads, prospects, and sales from people you would have never reached using your grandpa’s hammer.

(1) Twitter User Statistics Revealed: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/14/twitter-user-statistics-r_n_537992.html