Brand your Tweets for Free

[fb-like] As a developer or a web savvy Twitter user with a business or blog site, branding your tweets can be free and relatively simple.

Alternate and more powerful paid services exist such as MarketMeTweet. If you want more twitter functionality realted to marketing, choose this as it seems to be the best. If you only want to brand tweets and not pay a monthly fee, you could follow the remainder of this post. How it works... [singlepic id=6 w=960 h=720 float=none] Requirements:

• Twitter Account
• Your own Twitter Application
• A blog with plugin or stand-alone software that uses Twitter Applications and oAuth authentication

Create a Twitter Application Log-in to your twitter account and go to the Twitter Applications page. There you should fill out the form with these application settings in the image below. [singlepic id=4 w=320 h=240 float=center] The other important text fields here are:

1. Your Application name as it will be the name seen in the branding below your tweets.
2. Your application website, this will be what the Application name above is linked to.
3. The Callback URL; This differs per plugin/module used with the twitter application but it at least has to be the domain of the site you will use the application on as far as I am aware. See your plugin or modules readme!

Configure your Blog to Communicate with Your Twitter App I have only performed this configuration with the CMS' Wordpress and Drupal so far, but the theory will work on other CMS' and Client Software. Users without access to a hosting account can use one of the many free hosting companies out there or a blog hosted by Wordpress.com. For Wordpress I used the plugin Simple Twitter Connect, by the same author as Simple Facebook Connect and enabled the Base and "STC - Twitter Dashboard" plugins. I then entered the Consumer Key and Consumer Secret values from the Twitter Application I created into the Simple Twitter Connect plugin settings. See images below. I then went to my Wordpress Dashboard and used the new Twitter Publish Tab seen below which is added by the STC - Twitter Dashboard Plugin and composed a Tweet. [singlepic id=3 w=320 h=240 float=none] It should prompt you with regard to allowing your application access to your twitter account, so click "Allow". [singlepic id=21 w=320 h=240 float=none] At this stage you and your followers should see the branded tweet in your feed. [singlepic id=2 w=320 h=240 float=none] For Drupal I just followed this blog post on "How to get Drupal to post updates to Twitter again" by Valkyri9. It is really quite similar, as long as your application has authorised access from your Drupal account, your tweets through Drupal with be branded!