If you’re looking for a way to engage readers in your blog, you’d be wise to consider embedding social media content into everything you post. It’s a great way to cross-pollinate your accounts, pushing readers to and fro amidst your original content and pumping up your followers. It’s also a good way to add more interesting visuals to a blog post, breaking up the tedium of a long, wordy post. Read on for tips on how to embed tweets, Instagram photos and Facebook posts into your blog, in ways you might not expect.
Make Twitter Work for You
You can embed any tweet in your blog post. Though many businesses choose to embed tweets from their own Twitter accounts, you can grab them from other accounts as well, and it’s very simple to do. Find the tweet that you want to embed. In the lower right-hand corner, click on the “More” button, then choose “Embed This Tweet.” A box will pop up that says at the top, “Add this Tweet to your website by copying the code below.”
Copy the code in the box. Then go to your blog post and paste the copied material. It will show up on your page in a small box that includes the name and profile picture of the person who tweeted it, as well as an option to follow that person. You can also embed entire conversations with a similar click of the button.
The advantage to using embedded tweets, rather than just writing out what a person tweeted, is that they give the reader the option of finding your business or the person you are quoting directly, without having to do a search on their own. It also gives some color to the story, showing how that person chose to represent him or herself on Twitter.
Instagram Your Way to New Followers
Instagram is one of the newer social networks, and it’s red hot right now, offering users a way to share photos and video. If you want to help build a following on Instagram, embedding some of your photos on your blog is a great start.
Instagram updated its features fairly recently to include a share button that’s a snap to use. Just hit the button on the right side, located under the comments button, and a block of web code will pop up. Copy it and paste onto your blog. The photo will pop up on your blog, along with your username and a link to your account, making it much easier for people to find you on the social media site.
Note that this feature is available only to those who are on public settings. If you have a private account where you’ve been posting, for example, photos of juicers for sale or puppy stickers you’re giving away, you’ll need to change your settings to public in order to share on your blog.
Sharing Your Facebook Status
Embedding Facebook statuses is another great way to break up the gray blocks of text on your blog, in addition to exposing your company’s page to more readers. Facebook launched a pilot program allowing people to share public posts by select businesses last summer too. Like Instagram and Twitter, this feature is very user-friendly.
Hit the drop-down menu button in the upper right corner of the post you want to embed, and select “Embed Post.” A box will pop up offering the option to copy the post’s code. Then paste that code into your blog, and the status will pop up on your page, including links to the comments, likes and shares each post has received.