Embedding Twitter Videos

[amycatling]

Hi everyone,

Every fortnight we host a Twitter Q&A and post the highlights on to a blog on our community. Normally I do this by saving the tweets used in the highlights as an image which works fine.

Next week our Q&A guest will be using video to respond to each tweet. We did a video announcement earlier this week so I've just tested if this format works on a blog post by pulling out the "embed video" code from the tweet and putting this into the HTML body of the blog post. But the video doesn't seem to pull through, just the text and a link to the video.

Does anyone have any advice on how to get videos from a tweet on to a blog post on the platform?

Thanks!

[ClaudiusH]

Hi,
I assume the video relies on some parameters from its parent tweet to be present. Did you try embedding the full tweet containing the video in your blog?

[amycatling]

Hi @ClaudiusH,

I tried embedding the full tweet and although the preview on Twitter shows the video, when I put this on Lithium the same thing happens with a link to the tweet appearing instead of the video. Thanks for the suggestions anyway!

[ClaudiusH · Accepted solution]

I gave it a try myself and attempted embedding a tweet into a blog article on the Lithium community platform. It indeed fails because

the script portion of the tweet  embed widget

<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

...is being stripped from the blog article when it's being posted. This is a security measure to prevent (malicious) scripts from being inserted into user generated community content. Unfortunately it also means that the embedded tweet will remain text only.

I think the closest you can get is by manually inserting a screenshot of the video thumbnail with the play button and linking it to the full tweet, so that blog visitors can click through to the full video in tweet experience.

[amycatling]

Ahh no problem. Thanks for your help with this!

[ClaudiusH]

Oh... and just to make sure you haven't forgotten about this: Make sure to enable the rich content widget for posts.

See the example tweet below.

[7storms]

Ran into the same problem and was wondering about how to get that video working. Thanks!

[amycatling]

Hi @7storms, I managed to sort this out by using iframe code to embed the tweet. This is the code, all you need to do is enter the URL of your tweet where I've mentioned below:

<p><iframe src="https://twitframe.com/show?url=URL OF YOUR TWEET" border="0" height="300" width="550" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>

[MichaelAtHP]

@ClaudiusH

Thanks for your answer to the Twitter question, I was trying to embed a Twitter poll - same problem!

Any guess why this doesn't work? I get the plain text at the top and bottom but only the frame in the middle, no video. My ultimate goal is to embed a poll into a blog post but until I figure out what's allowed/works I'm not going spend my time looking at polling tools.

<p>This is a test of embedding a bbc</p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.bbc.com/news/av/embed/p05tl8xb/42656846" width="400" height="500" frameborder="10"></iframe></p>
<p>End of test of embedding a bbc</p>

[ClaudiusH]

Did you try embedding it via twitframe.com as outlined in Amy's reply just before you?

Also: When attempting to include <iframe> keep in mind that your community user needs to have full HTML permissions as otherwise part of it could be stripped out again on posting.