It’s about time Twitter did something useful as announcements from the company of late haven’t offered much to get excited about.
This week Twitter announced the launch of their new follow button, which will allow users to follow Twitter accounts with a single click directly from any website.
Image credit – Mykl Roventine
At first glance this may not seem like a new feature, as many websites already have a ‘follow us on Twitter’ button, a little blue bird icon, or something similar.
Historically, the problem with Twitter buttons is that the user had to be redirected to a publisher’s Twitter page in order to follow them. Not ideal.
The difference with the new button is that users won’t have to navigate away from the site in order to follow said publisher. As far as we can see, this is a win-win situation – it’s easier for the user and publishers stand less chance of losing the attention of those users.
Adding a Twitter button to a webpage/s is easy, head over to twitter.com/about/resources/followbutton, fill out a few details and copy and paste the HTML in to the code of your page/s. Then it’s just a case of sitting back and watching the followers roll in. Of course, that probably won’t happen, you do of course first need a Twitter stream that users deem worthy of following. That’s the hard bit.
The internet seems to be overrun with buttons, tabs, widgets and apps – are publishers relying too heavily on these tools to perform miracles? Your thoughts are welcomed.
For some examples of the follow button in action, check out www.telegraph.co.uk and www.imdb.com.
