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

Posted by Angus Russell

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.

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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.

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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.

Once you click the “Follow” button, the window closes.

You can be one of the first to add a follow button to your website at twitter.com/followbutton.

What do you think, do you like the popup? Or would you prefer a one-click-follow?