Quick! Be one of the first to add Twitter’s new “Follow” button to your website.

Posted by Angus Russell

Share4

Tweet5

9 Shares

Facebook’s ‘Like Box’

We’ve all seen a Facebook ‘Like Box’ before, even though some of us may not have know what it was called.

Bonus: Download the 33 free templates from Web Marketing That Works.

[sc name=”like-boxes”]

The Facebook Like Box has a couple of advantages over a simple link to your Facebook page:

The user can like your page without having to leave your website, and
It can also display your news feed, follower count and profile pictures of your fans.

These two advantages make it more likely that a single website visitor will ‘Like’ your Facebook page because:

They can see that your page is active and that you have some fans (possibly even some of their own friends are fans), and
It’s as easy as a single click, and won’t distract them from other tasks.

Twitter’s Answer

It’s been possible to display your latest tweets on your website for quite a while now, either with Twitter’s widget builder or a number of other plugins and packages. What Twitter hasn’t had though, is the single click follow. Any “Follow us on Twitter” link would simply point to twitter.com/username, meaning that the user is taken away from your website… Until now.

Yesterday, Twitter announced their new “Follow” button as an answer to this problem.

[sc name=”follow-buttons”]

The “Follow” button still isn’t a one-click process, but it’s a big step towards it. Rather than take the user away from your website, a smaller window pops up and displays your profile, a follow button, two of your latest tweets and a preview of who you’re following and who’s following you.