Embedding a Tweet Instead of Copying It

A picture of a tweet

An article quotes a tweet, and the quickest way to show it is a screenshot: a picture of the tweet, pasted into the page.

That picture cannot be checked. A reader cannot click through to see whether the tweet exists, who wrote it, or whether the words were changed, and screenshots are easy to fake.

It also copies whatever was in the tweet, including a photograph that belongs to somebody else.

Twitter offers another way: embedding the original, so it appears in the article as the author posted it, with their name, the date and a link back.

Each choice has a cost, and which to use depends on the job the tweet is doing in the article.

What a screenshot loses

• The link back to the original, so nobody can check it.
• The author's name, when it is cropped off or too small to read.
• The date, often trimmed away to make the picture neater.
• The words as text, so search engines and screen readers miss them.
• The photographer's permission, when the tweet carries their picture.

The fifth has real consequences. A photograph belongs to whoever took it, and posting it on Twitter is not permission for it to appear on your website as a copy.

What embedding does

Every tweet has an embed option in its menu, under More. It gives a short piece of code to paste into your page.

The code shows the tweet as Twitter displays it: the author's name and handle, the date, the words, any photograph, and links to the original and to the author's profile.

The tweet itself stays on Twitter's servers. Readers can click through and check it, and the words are also in your page as text, inside the code.

When the original disappears

An embed depends on the original. If the author deletes the tweet, deletes the account or makes it private, the embedded version stops displaying.

What remains is usually the plain text inside the code, unformatted, with links to a page that no longer exists. Any photograph is gone.

For an article that leaned on that tweet, the evidence has gone with it. So keep a dated screenshot of anything important in your own files, unpublished, as a record.

When to embed

Embed when the tweet itself is the point: the photograph, the exact form of the words, the fact that a particular person said it in public.

Embed when the source is likely to stay, such as an organisation's account or a well-established one, and when you want readers to be able to check it.

An embed gives credit automatically, because the author's name and link are part of it.

When to quote it as text

When only the words matter, quote them in the article as ordinary text, attributed: the person's name, their handle, the date, and a link to the tweet.

Text survives deletion, reads well on any screen, works with screen readers and loads instantly. It also lets you quote the one sentence that matters rather than the whole tweet.

Quote exactly. Do not tidy the spelling inside quotation marks, and mark any words you leave out.

A worked example

A small mushroom farm in a converted barn grows oyster, shiitake and lion's mane mushrooms, sells to restaurants in the city, and keeps a news page on its website.

Every few months it published a round-up of dishes chefs had made with its mushrooms, built from screenshots of restaurants' tweets: the dish, a line of praise, often a photograph.

One photograph had been taken by a food photographer the restaurant had hired. She wrote to ask why her work was on the farm's website without her name.

Another screenshot had its date cropped off, and a reader pointed out that the dish had left the restaurant's menu long before.

The farm replaced the screenshots. Tweets where the photograph was the point are now embedded, so each appears with the restaurant's name, the date and a link.

The food photographer was asked, and is now credited by name under the embedded tweet that carries her picture.

Tweets where only the words mattered are quoted as text, with the chef's name, the restaurant's handle, the date and a link. Dated screenshots of everything sit in a folder of the farm's own, unpublished.

Crediting either way

Name people the way they present themselves, with their handle and the date. Link to the original even when quoting in text, so readers can check.

For photographs, credit the photographer, not only the account that posted the picture. They are often different people.

If you want a photograph itself on your site, rather than inside an embed, ask the photographer first, and credit it the way they ask.

Many tweets on one page

Each embed loads a script and a card from Twitter. One or two in an article make little difference. Twenty in a round-up make the page slow, and it jumps about as each card appears.

For a long round-up, quote most tweets as text and embed only the few where the picture matters.

The counter-case

Sometimes a screenshot is the right record: when the point of the article is that a tweet was changed or deleted, and you are documenting what it said.

Then label it plainly as a screenshot, with the author, the date it was posted and the date it was captured.

A business blog will rarely be in that position. For ordinary use the advice holds: embed when the tweet itself matters, quote as text when the words do, and credit both.

Before the next round-up

1. Ask what the tweet is doing in the article.
2. Embed it when the photograph or exact form matters.
3. Quote it as text when only the words matter.
4. Credit the photographer, not only the account.
5. Keep a dated screenshot privately, unpublished.
6. Link every quote to the original tweet.
7. Replace old screenshots already on your site.

Step four gets skipped more than any other. The account that posted a picture is frequently not the person who took it, and the photographer is the one with the rights.

What a business page should be posting in the first place is covered in what Facebook counts as too promotional.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.