Now all content requests must be authenticated.ġ) We’ll start by inserting the necessary scripts to get the info from Twitter (special thanks to webdesigndev):Ģ) Then we can grab our custom field value which will contain the username of the staff member: This method for displaying content from Twitter was stopped by Twitter in June of 2013. The first thing we want to do is determine where we want to display the latest tweet and then throw in the necessary script to make it show up. Once this is done, our Twitter requests will be authenticated and will work with the Twitter API 1.1. Once we have completed the setup for the app, we need to go to our site’s Dashboard – – > Settings – – > Twitter API and enter all four keys. Once downloaded we can upload, install and activate the plugin within WordPress.Ģ) Next we need to create a Twitter App and obtain our API keys. So all we have to do is download the development version of the plugin under the Developers tab and we are golden. For what we are about to do we will be needing version 1.1.0 of this plugin which at the time of this writing has not yet been released. Setup Latest Tweets pluginġ) We’ll start by installing the Latest Tweets plugin. So it makes sense to have a post type for staff and an obvious field for entering a Twitter handle and it makes my job easy to have one PHP file to modify with all of my staff related tweaks. However, it is important to me that the process creating the bios is simple and intuitive, plus I have loads of customizations to make to the staff pages that don’t belong on any other pages. There are technically a variety of ways that we could choose to accomplish our end goal of displaying the latest tweets. Why create the custom post type and template? We could probably do a tutorial on this at some point in the future but for instructions on creating your own custom post template visit this how to. This way we can write up bios for each staff member and simply insert their username into a field. Then we used CustomPress again to create a custom field call “Twitter Username”. We really wanted to make our staff pages useful to our visitors and worth checking out so we used a plugin called CustomPress to create a custom post type called “Employees”. If you want to see the end result, just visit the bio page of any team member listed on the Real Big Marketing staff page. This can start with some social sharing and follow buttons as well as some feeds like the one you’ll see in the footer of our site that give visitors an opportunity to connect more with your company and gives them a sense that you are active and engaging.īut what about the staff bio pages? We established that they are some of the most commonly visited pages on the average website so what can we do to set them apart? Perhaps an integration of each staff member’s social activity could do the trick.Īt least this is what we think and this is why we opted to bring in some Twitter activity for each member of our team on their bio page so visitors can see what each person is up to and talking about in a fresh, engaging way. One thing that we have found to be very effective in engaging visitors and keeping our site’s pages looking fresh and interactive is to integrate social media. For this reason, it behooves us to make them worthwhile. Bio pages can, of course, help with this a little but as far as conversion goes, they are not the strongest.īut despite the fact that we’d often prefer that visitors spend time checking out our services and products and doing what we want them to do, many visitors will inevitably spend a lot of time pouring over our staff bios. That is to say that most people don’t build a site to show off the bios of their employees but to sell products and services. This fact often perplexes and even frustrates many web marketers because they are rarely the pages that webmasters WANT people going to. Our research has confirmed again and again that some of the most commonly visited pages on websites are those that pertain to the people who work there.
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