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Category: Twitter

How to Embed Tweets into Your WordPress Blog Posts

Matthew Wilson Leave a comment

One of the powerful aspects of social content is that it is portable – that is, it can be easily shared and republished in a variety of ways.  Whether it is an Instagram photo or a Tweet, this content is designed to be shared as a social object. This post will take a look at Tweets and how you can embed tweets in WordPress blogs or websites in their native format.

Embed Tweets on Your WordPress Blog

Twitter content is perfect for sharing.  Tweets are usually concise thoughts that are short and to the point.  They can quickly summarize a person’s point of view, opinion, or outlook without getting too detailed.

You can easily screen-capture a tweet and include it in your blog as an image, but if you want to give readers an easy way to favorite, retweet, or reply to the tweet right from your blog page, you’ll want to embed it.

Every tweet has a “More” menu accessible by clicking on the button with the three dots that appears at the end of the tweet.  Go to this menu and select “Embed Tweet”.



This will give you a snippet of custom code that can be added to a website or blog.  To get this code, simply copy it from the “Embed this Tweet” dialog box and close it.


To embed this tweet in a WordPress post, simply create a new post (or edit one you’ve already started), select “text” editing mode, and paste the code from Twitter. Save the post and preview or publish it.

Here’s an embedded tweet to show you how this content appears in a WordPress post:


Notice how you can reply, favorite, or retweet the content right from this page?  Any links or hashtags are also clickable.  MUCH more functional than a screenshot.

You can similarly embed a tweet in another content publishing tool or website by pasting this embed code snippet directly into your HTML code.

Can I Embed Tweets in Facebook Posts?
No. This method will NOT work as a way to embed tweets in other social media content.  Here is what happened when I tried to use this embed code in a Facebook post:


Facebook does not allow HTML markup tags within status updates, so the code appeared exactly as it is.  

For more info on embedding Tweets, see this Twitter Help Center article.

A Cavalcade of Tweets

Matthew Wilson Leave a comment

Some great action on the #unidigadv hashtag this week! My students have been working really hard to complete an epic three month long project using social media to build a personal brand. Their final deliverable was a 20-30 slide presentation documenting their project, the quantitative metrics they collected along the way, and their assessment of their success. Many students started panicking on Wednesday as they realized how much work their final presentation would entail.

#unidigadv getting close to project time, anyone else questioning why you waited so long to post?

— Marie Pistek (@RealEtechs) November 13, 2013

Social media project due in T-minus 54 hours. Having a minor panic attack #unidigadv

— Lindsay Hotze (@lindsayhotze) November 13, 2013

After seeing past presentations of #unidigadv Social Media Projects…I've made the executive decision to go hide until Christmas. Bye.

— Kayla Wolthoff (@kwolthoff) November 13, 2013

Is it just me, or is everyone freaking out about this presentation due in two days? #unidigadv

— Janey Meyer (@UNIquefashion23) November 13, 2013

So who's completely overwhelmed with this presentation?! #unidigadv

— Kaylin Westhoff (@TuneInCountry) November 14, 2013

It's sickening/incredible how fast time flies when working on my Social Media Project #unidigadv #almostdone

— Dynamite Ads (@DynamiteAds) November 15, 2013

Doug Drees and Therese Kuster from Targetclick were listening in and gave my students an open invitation to contact Targetclick for internships. Nice to see some local industry professionals who know where to look for talent!

@cecilkleakins Have any rockstar #unidigadv students looking for an internship next semester? Have them reach out to @TargetClickMktg

— Doug Drees (@DougDrees) November 13, 2013

@DougDrees @cecilkleakins @TargetClickMktg We'd love to hear from them! Lots of great opportunities with our team.

— Therese Kuster (@tckuster) November 13, 2013

As the project deadline loomed, students began to see the light at the end of the tunnel as they wrapped up their projects. There was a mixture of exhilaration, sadness, and accomplishment.

Finishing up my #socialmedia project for #unidigadv. Learned so much! #bittersweet

— Melissa Fager (@MidwestTourism) November 15, 2013

27 slides and 12 hours later…I'm done with my presentation!! #unidigadv

— Connie Chuong (@chuongconnie) November 15, 2013

3 months ago I started a blog. Now I'm summing it all up in one epic masterpiece #unidigadv

— Clay Swanson (@clayswansun) November 15, 2013

1 hour and 5 minutes until our #unidigadv project is due. Time for the final adjustments.

— Cody (@CodyRohlf) November 15, 2013

Getting closer to finishing #unidigadv #BrandingProject2013

— Marie Pistek (@RealEtechs) November 15, 2013

Wishing I wasn't such a perfectionist when it came to creative projects..6 on a Fri night and I'm still working away #homestretch #unidigadv

— Courtney Nagle (@CourtNagle) November 16, 2013

ABOUT TO SUBMIT MY #unidigadv PROJECT. Can I get a round of applause? WHOO HOO

— Bailey Anderson (@travel_merIT) November 15, 2013

Yes – you can get a round of applause – you ALL can.

Nice work. Have a great weekend.

Cool Party Trick: Tweet from the Command Line!

Matthew Wilson Leave a comment

Twitter is one of the most powerful social platforms to tap into because 1) Tweets are concise and standardized, and 2) Tweets are transparent and open for all to access and use. Many companies have developed ways of collecting and analyzing tweets to create useful insights about what is being discussed on Twitter.

I started reading the excellent Mining the Social Web by Matthew Russell published by O’Reilly, one of my favorite publishers of technology books. The book discusses how the incredible social data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites can be programmatically accessed and harvested for later research and analysis.

(If you are interested, you can follow the author of this book on Twitter @ptwobrussell and @SocialWebMining)


Chapter one discusses how to access Twitter through a command line interface and Python using Mike Cardone’s Python Twitter Tools. 

After being sure that easy_install was working (and knowing that Python was already running on my Mac OS X laptop), It was easy enough to get PTT installed – using Terminal (the Mac OS X command line terminal emulator), I just typed in:

$ easy_install twitter

Once installed, you can tweet from Terminal with a simple command like:

$ twitter set “Class work day in #unidigadv #blogging #tweeting”

One quick command, and a second later, my tweet was live:

Class work day in #unidigadv #blogging #tweeting
— Matthew Wilson (@cecilkleakins) October 5, 2012


Now that’s a pretty cool party trick, but the real power of accessing data from the social web lies in integrating the Twitter API with a programming languages like Python or Ruby to gather, analyze, and visualize the data in interesting ways.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out this book – or its companion volume, 21 Recipes for Mining Twitter.