Embeddable Tweets: Add Single Tweets To Any Web Page & Skip The Screenshots

In addition to launching brand pages, updating its user interface and tweaking its button set, Twitter has also launched embeddable Tweets — a tool that makes it brain-dead simple to add tweets to any web page without the hassle of making screenshots.

As Twitter explains on its developers’ blog:

Today, we’re introducing embeddable Tweets, a new way to add any Tweet to your website just by copying and pasting a line of code. Your website visitors will see a Tweet that focuses on the content by surfacing the conversation and media. Visitors can follow the author with a single-click, and reply, retweet, or favorite the Tweet without leaving the page.

Once you’re able to access the new Twitter, there’ll be a new “Embed this Tweet” link on every tweet’s permalink URL. Here’s a look at what an embedded tweet looks like from Twitter’s announcement:

It’s even easier to embed tweets if you’re using WordPress.com. According to founder Matt Mullenweg, placing a tweet permalink on a single line will generate an embedded tweet automatically. WordPress.com also has a new shortcode that supports embedded tweets.

This doesn’t appear to be supported on self-hosted WordPress blogs, though. There is, however, a plugin called Embedly that offers very similar cut-and-paste embedding for tweets — not to mention dozens of other types of content (like YouTube videos, Quora pages and much more).

So it seems that the days of having to make screenshots of tweets, and then transcribing them, too, are coming to an end.

What It Means For Marketers

More importantly from a marketing perspective, individual tweets are now as portable as other types of web content. They can be embedded as simply as a YouTube video. That opens up opportunities for viral marketing that didn’t exist as easily before.

The presumption, of course, is that your tweets are interesting enough that others will want to embed them — but that’s the same presumption with videos or any type of content. The challenge for marketers is create content that people want to spread. And on Twitter, you have to do it in just 140 characters.

For related coverage on the from around the web, see Techmeme.