Tip: If your blog comments have moved to Twitter, embed tweets at the end of your posts

@paulbradshaw @BBCCollege interesting piece. to your final point, curation can be scaleable eg. if users are involved. Wikipedia?

— Sarah Hartley (@foodiesarah) July 3, 2014

What happens when people comment on your blog – but it’s not on your blog?

More often than not people now comment on a blog post by tweeting – essentially microblogging – their response.

Those comments can be valuable – but they’re lost to anyone reading the original post and, indeed, yourself, unless you can later find it through search.

In ye olde days of blogging, blogged responses could be automatically added to your comments section via pingbacks. But microblogged responses don’t qualify for pingbacks.

So why not add them manually: embed those tweets at the end of your article by pasting the link to the tweet. WordPress will automatically turn that link into an embedded tweet.

You can then subhead those embedded tweets as ‘Comments‘, or add an ‘UPDATE‘.

For two examples see the end of this post on Curation, aggregation and why news organisations can’t be ‘the next LinkedIn’. Or this post on capitalisation in UK headlines, updated with a response from Guardian Style:

@robcrilly @paulbradshaw I Promise You That Hell Will Freeze Over Before We Start Capitalising Every Word In A Headline.

— Guardian style guide (@guardianstyle) November 21, 2014

4 thoughts on “Tip: If your blog comments have moved to Twitter, embed tweets at the end of your posts”

Flor Coelho (@fcoel) December 16, 2014 at 5:35 pm

Hi Paul!

I am longing for a plugin that aggregates in tabs (?): comments, repercusion/conversations in main social networks, etc. for a single post.

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1. Paul Bradshaw Post authorDecember 17, 2014 at 11:22 am
  
  Yikes! Sounds a great idea. You’d have to dynamically grab the URL of the post and generate a widget for search results on that URL in Twitter.
  
  Alternatively you could just use a search for the base url (onlinejournalismblog.com) and put that widget on the site as a whole.
  
  Reply ↓
  1. Paul Bradshaw Post authorDecember 17, 2014 at 11:26 am
    
    Actually, I think I’ve just done it. All you need to do is use the Twitter Timeline widget. Then use the link in that to go and create a widget on Twitter using their Widgets Configurator (https://twitter.com/settings/widgets/).
    
    In that configurator, click the ‘search’ tab to create a search widget, enter your base url as a search term, customise any other options and copy the ID from the code generated (alternatively it’s also in the URL after widgets/)
    
    Go back to WordPress and your widget settings and paste that ID number. Save.
Flor Coelho (@fcoel) December 17, 2014 at 7:40 pm

Coool!!! \o/

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