Have you ever considered that one of the reasons YouTube became so popular is because there are YouTube videos embedded all over the web. There is a good chance that on any given day, you will see YouTube videos without ever actually visiting YouTube. It’s a one reason YouTube videos go viral. It’s not just on YouTube. Now it looks like Twitter is getting ready to launch embeddable tweets.
Implications for Twitter
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine on the web, according to YouTube. In other ways, Twitter search holds that same title according to Twitter, as reported by Danny Sullivan, who also explains some of the caveats to this claim, which greatly dilute its effect. Either way, YouTube likely has embeddable videos to thank for a good deal of its visibility and ultimately its usage. If you think Twitter is big now, wait until Tweets are embedded everywhere.
Clearly there is already demand for such a feature as many publications (WebProNews included) will place images of tweets in articles when quoting. If tweets are easily embeddable, you can pretty much guarantee that you’re going to see a lot more tweets visually appearing in content all over the web. Like it did for YouTube, this may bring a great deal more visibility and usage to Twitter.
Tweets as News
It’s no secret at this point that Twitter is a medium for breaking news. Sure, it’s a medium for a great deal of noise, but news breaks on Twitter all the time. Chalk it up to the ease of which it takes to enter in 140 characters or less on the scene from your mobile device. It’s a lot simpler than concocting an entire article or blog post.
News outlets are already turning to Twitter every day for stories and quotes, and to interact with their readerships/viewerships. Embedding tweets will only be an extension of this, in the online news world. It will likely inspire newsmakers to turn to Twitter first, so they can get their Tweet embedded in any publication or blog that chooses to cover the topic. The news-breaking tweet is likely to be the one embedded.
If you’re a news organization or a blogger yourself, it’s going to be much quicker and easier to assert yourself as the breaker of the news via a quick tweet before you take the time to write the post/article and give others a chance to catch up. If bloggers/journalists weren’t breaking their news with Twitter already, this is going to give them a greater incentive to do so.
Promoted Tweets
Twitter announced its ad platform Promoted Tweets last month. In this system, only tweets that receive high levels of engagement will remain promoted (and get that ad real estate at the top of relevant Twitter search results pages).
Image from AdAge
Embeddable Tweets will likely fuel engagement. Having not actually seen the layout yet, it’s hard to say to what extent this will be the case, but if Twitter includes engagement buttons for replying, retweeting, and favoriting (as I assume they will), it’s going to inspire more engagement from readers, and with the tweets appearing on various blogs and news sites, it’s gong to open up the audience for that particular tweet. It’s not going to be limited to one’s followers, and search queries.
Increased Followers
To the point of increased visibility, it stands to reason that embedded tweets will also potentially lead to more followers for the Twitterer. Let’s say I’ve never heard of you, but you tweet about the kind of stuff I’m interested in. Being interested in that stuff, I might regularly read a blog about whatever that might be. Given that you tweet about that stuff, said blog may embed a particular tweet from you in some blog post. Then I see that tweet, which I find valuable, and discover a new person to follow on Twitter. Just like that, you’ve gained a new follower. Assuming that blog has more readers interested in that topic, you may gain a significant amount of new followers, all from that single tweet that was embedded in that single blog post.
Reason to Tweet More
This should be viewed as a reason to tweet more if you are currently a light Tweeter. The more you tweet, the more content there is that may be embedded by someone, then you can possibly reap the benefits discussed above.
That said, this isn’t reason to tweet insignificant thoughts. The content is king rule still applies here. Tweet things of value, and you will be more likely to attract embeds. It’s not really that different than attracting retweets in that sense.
I wouldn’t expect as many embeds as retweets by any means. Even if embedding a tweet is greatly simplified, it’s still not going to be as simple as hitting a retweet button, and not all of your followers have blogs or publications. However, those who view your tweets and do have blogs/publications may embed a valuable tweet, and they just may have a much bigger audience than you do on Twitter. It’s something to think about.
Now, hopefully Twitter is actually releasing embeddable tweets so this entire article isn’t a totalwaste. Still, with the hint they dropped, what else could they mean? We’ll find out soon enough.
Update: Twitter has now updated its post saying, “No, really. It’s very simple. Just a snippet of code you’ll be able to use to generate simple, selectable flat-HTML tweets like the one we used here.”
The embedded tweet in that example does not include the engagement features like reply, retweet, favorite. It would be a lot more useful if it did. I would still not be suprised to see it happen eventually. It should still carry most of the benefits mentioned in this article.
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