Being Creative With Social Media

Today is one of those creative days I have where I like to think about ‘what can I do to make my site more interesting?’ Well as I was browsing over at John’s new layout which was designed by UBD I noticed that he displays his Twitter follower count in a dynamically generated graphic that was created by TwitterCounter.

I looked over at TwitterCounter to see what they were about and after looking at my followers (as of this posting there are 175 of you!) I noticed at the bottom that Dani McDaniel created a fun looking graphic which utilizes a piece of javascript code to pull your follower number. Now I thought it looked cool, interesting and a bit more fun than the regular chicklet you see (such as the one on John’s site) and since I love to use Photoshop to create new things (which is also a form of practice) I came up with the following image for my site:

As you can see from the above image it was set up to work with my right side column with a drop shadow to create the illusion of either sunken or popping out depending on your vision. The javascript is placed in a relative spot using CSS so that my number of followers is displayed. Pretty neat huh?

WordTwit

If you run a WordPress blog and have a Twitter account I would recommend combining WordPress and Twitter with a creation from BraveNewCode: WordTwit. What WordTwit does is allows you to automatically generate a tweet when you post something new. What I like about it is I write post set it to a future date and forget about it (until I read comments etc). WordTwit kicks in when the post is published and all your followers are notified of your new post!

wpCommentTwit

Another plugin that I love using and will be using when I get my new blog designed and running is the WordPress plugin I wrote called wpCommentTwit. This plugin allows you to be notified (similar to the way WordTwit works) when someone has left an approved comment on your blog. Your Twitter Bot (which you create) sends you a Direct Message (which skips the API timer delay) and you get instant notification of a new comment. If you are not logged into Twitter then the Direct Message will be there waiting for you when you do.

If you are into the Social Media scene are using Twitter yet? If not why not? Join Today and Follow Me!