With this potential reach, allowing users to easily share web pages they come across is a very beneficial idea. This blog runs on the WordPress CMS so adding social link sharing functionality can be done easily with various plugins.

If you are not on a CMS with easily available plugins and want to share links, you can use traditional links to send your page details to the respective sites. Its very easy to do, here is how to do it for the popular social networks.

Note: I was in two minds as to publish this post, there are many plugins for WordPress that can do this, and its VERY simple to implement. At the same time it may help someone out there, so here you have it…

Twitter

Sharing to Twitter involves some limitations as the character count is only 140 and if your sharing a URL which is particularly long then you may want to look into incorporating Bit.ly’s API to auto shrink before sending your user over to Twitter or they will have to do this manually which defeats the object of ‘quick’ sharing links.

Regardless of this sharing to Twitter is very straight forward and all you have to do is link to the following:

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=MESSAGE+URL GOES HERE" title="Share to Twitter">Share to Twitter</a>

Lets give it a try then! Click on the link and you should be taken to Twitter where the status box is already filled in: Share to Twitter

Facebook

Next up is Facebook and again its fairly straight forward using a very similar method. For Facebook links you must specify a URL and a Title of the item you are sharing. Lets say we want to share a page called “The Design Woop Blog” and link it to http://designwoop.com then we would use the following format:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://designwoop.com&amp;t=The Design Woop Blog" title="Share to Facebook">Share to Facebook</a>

Again lets try out the following link and see what happens… Share to Facebook

Digg

Digg has a rather slick sharing app, simply pass the URL to the app and it will pull the title and description automatically, if you like you can edit this before you submit it.

The code looks like:

<a href="http://digg.com/submit?url=http://designwoop.com">Share to Digg</a>

See it in action - Share to Digg

Delicious

The future of Delicious is perhaps a little debatable, it still is a great tool to organise your bookmarks and share links.  Include the code below for a share link to Delicious, you can parameters such as the URL, title and notes to the Delicious link sharer app.

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://designwoop.com&amp;amp;title=CSS, HTML, jQuery, CSS3&amp;notes=add your notes here, shubba!">Share to Delicious</a>

See it in action – Share to Delicious

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is very straight forward, simply pass your desired URL and title through the link and there you have it, a very simple and very straight forward way to share your link with a ton of people.

<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url={LINK URL}&amp;title={PAGE TITLE}">Share to StumbleUpon</a>

See it in action – Share to StumbleUpon

Facebook reached 550 millions accounts this summer. It’s 80mlns bigger then European Union population.

Anyhow Facebook provides many tools to maximizing your presence on the social network. You can not only stay in contact with your friends abroad but you can also do business and make some statistics calculations. With use of Facebook Apps and their API you can create stunning business and fan pages for your needs. Some simple and most popular method is FBML application with help of with you can create your own Facebook FBML pages.

So here are some examples on how to develop successful Facebook landing page. This is not a tutorial but if you would like to read some FBML tutorials you sould rather visit this page.
The main object on any Facebook FBML page is “call-to-action” or if we are trying to be more specific the “Like” button. Its critical to get as much Likes as you can on Facebook. More Likes you have better your business goes. So lets see how some populars companies converting Facebook traffic.

Facebook Call-to-Actions

Escape to Shape

Escape to Shape fanpage meets all requirements of Facebook marketing. You can see “Click to become a fan” action. Twitter, video and Feed call-to-actions. In general, they are good if you do not take into account the small holes in the design.

RodeoHouston

Fantastic Facebook landing page for fans and 1st visitors. You can see here attractive Become a Fan button, a BIG call-to-action sign forcing you to click and awesome designed page. Well-done Rodeo-Houston.

AllFacebook

You might know this Facebook insiders and one of the most popular website on FB news and releases. You can see here alot of tips where to click and what to do. You dont have to think on “Where am I?”. Click the Like button, become a fan, load the video and then subscribe to RSS or proceed to our website.

Sprout

Awesome “Like this page!” reminder. Everything is quite simple and usable. I’d just suggest to Sprout not to use Flash on their fanpage. It’s not a good practice for now.

Mashable

Magnificent landing page! “Join ME! You MUST join me Gendalf!” :) No comments.

New England Patriots

These New England Patriots made a good work with adding Live Radio app, poll, video podcast and some call-to-actions. Really good work to start your Facebook marketing campaign.

Online Stores

The 2d way to convert your fans and visitors is to integrate your online store directly into Facebook. It is difficult but worth the costs.

Adidas

Adidas is one of the 1st companies start using Facebook as their marketing tool. So they have a huge expirience in this niche. I think we should take some inspiration while making own personal fan page.

Jones Soda

Not so famous but still deserve to be listed. Integrated video, dynamic news, twitter feed (which is a big problem on Facebook), social media icons and iPhone app. All this with a good design makes popular Facebook FBML page.

DogPatch

Dogpatch developed by Sprout drives you all information need to meet this company and their services. The one page that gives you maximum information to make your choice.

Victoria’s Sicret

You should probably know that Vitoria’s Sicret according to Hitwise considered one of the best presented internet brands. They are doing a great job here at Facebook aswell.

Well, I hope that I’ve inspired you as to what successfully companies are doing within Facebook and gives you some ideas on how to start your Facebook campaign. Anyhow if you decided to create your own Facebook fan page you might try to use these FBML Templates or read some tips and tricks listed at the FBML blog

Since I have been on Twitter for a while now I thought it was right to post something about two minor things that I see on Twitter almost daily and two minor things which I think everyone should think about before doing. Please note these are only my opinions but two that I feel strongly about :)

Automatic Direct Messaging

First up is the automatic direct messaging new followers! They really bug me! Mainly because more often then not they are really cheesy/tacky. The majority of the time I will actually go back to the profile page of the sender and consider unfollowing them.

I think if your going to send auto DM’s then you should take a bit of consideration into what exactly your trying to get out of it. Sending me a cheesy message telling me how grateful you are because I followed you doesn’t really do anything for me and I think you lose that personal touch of actually taking the time to link that person into a Tweet saying simply thank you for the follow.

Just last week I got the following auto DM from a fellow Web Designer telling me this….

Now being a Web Designer myself why would I need one at my beck and call? Maybe I misread the DM but I thought for me this was irrelevant, I think a message saying hello I hope we can maybe help each other one day would have been better. Here’s another example of the type of DM’s I often get sent…

You might think i’m just been damn right picky here but come on “I’ll try to make it exciting” lol, how cheesy! This message has blatantly been sent to everyone not just me again losing the personal touch! How long does it take to add in my name? Just a thought!

Anyways before I start to rant on, I do actually think that Businesses can use auto DM’s in a good way to promote their products/services. Lets take Shutterstock as an example, the stock photography website sends its new Twitter followers the following DM…

This is a clever from Shutterstock because any new followers who maybe haven’t used or heard of Shutterstock before might now be tempted into signing up and giving the stock site a go, resulting in more sales! New followers might also spread the word amongst friends who might also then start following Shutterstock receiving their voucher code too.

I think companies can use this to their advantage plus everyone likes introdutory voucher discounts don’t they!

Following / Unfollowing Just To Gain Numbers

This is my ultimate Twitter no no! The amount of times I’ve had someone follow me then a couple of day’s later I’ve finally got round to checking out their profile page to see if I am going to follow them back only to find once I have returned the follow they then follow me again.

That might not make sense but all they are trying to do is gain a large number of followers without having to follow back. Twitter is all participating and trying to gain as many followers as possible might help more people see your Tweets but does it really make you a participant? I’d say no.

For certain people, such as celebrities I can understand that they would have lots of followers and maybe not following as many themselves, but for your average joe, I can’t. When I get a new follower, I take a brief look at their profile, decide wether or not they are at all interesting and wether or not they will be of any benefit to me having their tweets display in my feed. I would never follow someone then instantly unfollow them just to gain numbers!

My followers have always increased at a steady rate since I first joined Twitter and although its a nice feeling breaking 1k followers, it’s not something I was in a huge rush to do and the followers I have often contribute to my Tweets whether or not they are helping me or just replying to something I have said or even just RT’ing my links!

Here is the last 3 months stats on my followers (courtesy of Twittercounter)…

I personally think it’s better to gradually build up your followers instead of just adding thousands of people using some software because when it helps you understand Twitter better and will help you gain a better connection with your followers.

Conclusion

Right that is my rant over! :) I think Twitter (used right) is such an invaluable tool and for a Web Designer like myself, it’s a daily tool that I have come to depend on for resources / connections, etc. It annoys me that there are soo many ‘spamtastic’ users on Twitter clogging up the site with useless crap. Like I said, auto DM’s are handy, if used in a way that will benefit you! Does sending someone a useless cheesy welcome message make you feel good? Do you really need to add as many people as you could possible add? The answer is probably no for both!

As I said at the beginning these opinions are just mine but I would love to know what you think? Do you Auto DM? If you are currently sending out auto DM’s then I would love to know what your reasons are and what you actually send using the comments form below!

SimplePie makes it so simple to pull in feeds from not only twitter, but any RSS feed, and it allows you to do this with many more options then my previous tutorial! Lets start by visiting http://simplepie.org and downloading the latest copy of SimplePie. Next, unpackage the zip and upload the file simplepie.inc to your server, now your ready to start coding!

Now either create or open your PHP page, then include the file at the top of the page using the following code…

require_once('simplepie.inc');

Now you need to tell SimplePie the URL of your Twitter Feed, you can do this by adding the following line of code…

$feed = new SimplePie('http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:USERNAME');

Make sure you change USERNAME to your own Twitter username. Next you need to add in another two lines (shown below). The first line is needed to make sure SimplePie is initiated, the second allows SimplePie to tell what kind of feed is been pulled (ATOM, RSS, etc).

$feed->init();
$feed->handle_content_type();

Thats the basic setup done and SimplePie should hopefully be pulling the feed to your website. Now we need to use this feed and display it correctly on the website. Firstly, here is the code in full that should be at the top of your page…

require_once('simplepie.inc');
$feed = new SimplePie('http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:USERNAME');
$feed->init();
$feed->handle_content_type();

Right lets get the Tweet displaying on the page! To do so, we are going to need to call the Tweet itself, the link to the Tweet and also the date the Tweet was Tweeted (alot of Tweets there I know lol). We do so by using a simple foreach loop, which I have listed below…

<?php foreach ($feed->get_items(0, 1) as $item): ?>
<p><?php echo $item->get_description(); ?> <span><a href="<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>"><?php echo $item->get_date('D, M j, Y'); ?></a></span></p>
<?php endforeach; ?>

So lets explain the code! Earlier we set our feed URL to the value of $feed using SimplePie, now using the foreach loop we can use $feed->get_items(0, 1) as $item to call each tweet one at a time and pass it to the variable $item, which we can then do calls to get the information we need. The two numbers between the parentheses that you can see in the above block of code, can be changed to suit, I have explained what both are below:

• First number – this is the number of the item you want to start at. Remember that arrays begin with 0, not 1, so for this example, the most recent tweet will be called first. Changing this item to 1 will skip the latest tweet.
• Second Number – this is the number of items you want SimplePie to return. In this example I have it set to 1, which will only call one tweet.

Now we have our foreach loop setup and we know how to call each tweet, we need to do a few calls to get something displayed on the page. SimplePie has a huge list of functions that can be called, anything from calling Feed author right down to the Feed items date/time, etc, these can all be found here. For our Tweet we will require each items title, link and date. Using the SimplePie documentation, we can see that we need to call the functions within our foreach loop:

• get_description()
• get_permalink()
• get_date()

To call a function we need to use the following…

$item->FUNCTION_NAME();

Now we can introduce some HTML to sort out how the page will look. In this example, I have used simple paragraph tags and in between these tags I have called the title and the date of the Tweet. I wrapped the date with span tags so that I can then use CSS to shrink the text size and give more focus on the Tweet text. Finally the date is linked to the Tweet itself over at Twitter.

Now save it all, upload your files and try it out! Fingers crossed your page should be displaying x number of Tweets from your profile. I have included the source code below which you can download, if you have any problems then please leave a comment.

Download Source Files (.zip) | Demo

I have often found myself wondering if the celebs I am following are in fact actually them or just some crazed obsessed fan wanting 15 minutes of fame pretending to be there idol, and until now I have had no way of confirming my suspicitions.

The ‘Verified Account’ feature will add a badge to your Twitter page showing you are in fact who you say you are, and I guess give all the followers of that person peice of mind. I think this is a really good step from Twitter and very well timed, as the sites popularity is still rocketing, this will help cut out the crap so to speak!

To become ‘Verified’ you need to fill out a feedback form from the link below, but for now I think they are only dealing with users who have had re-occuring problems with people trying to impersonate them, or celebrity characters.

http://twitter.com/help/verified