The most important new Twitter feature for marketers isn't brand pages. Yes, you read that first sentence correctly. As part of its redesign announcement last week, Twitter revealed brand pages as well as a host of other features. Yes, brand pages are cool, but in reality, they don't offer much more value for a business over personal profiles aside from a little bit more control.

Embeddable tweets are the game changer in this most recent round of Twitter improvements for marketers. The fact is, the true power and leverage of much of social media marketing resides outside of the network itself. For many marketers, their biggest communities are outside of social media. For example, email list, website visitors, blog subscribers, etc. In the past, it has been a struggle to use these existing communities to supercharge social media efforts. Now, embeddable tweets helps make that a little easier. Your website or blog visitors can follow, retweet, or click on a link in an embedded tweet without ever having to leave your site. This is HUGE! Less friction means more conversions.

How to Embed a Tweet Using The New Twitter Web Design

Lets get right to it. Here is a step-by-step look at how you can embed a tweet.

Step 1: Sign into Twitter.com, and select a tweet you would like to embed. Then click "Open."

Step 2: Once the tweet is open, click on the "Details" link.

Step 3: Click the "Embed this Tweet" link.

Step 4: Select alignment, and then copy the HTML code.

Step 5: Paste the HTML into your website or blog editor and POOF!, your tweet is now embedded!

The Final Product:

Should I put a Facebook Share or a Facebook "Like" on a page? It can be so confusing! Learn when to use what. - ow.ly/7UHhT

— HubSpot (@HubSpot) December 13, 2011

7 Epic Uses of Twitter's New Embeddable Tweets Feature

Now that you are a tweet-embedding machine, we need to go over some best practices for using embedded tweets. While I'm sure you can think of more, these seven uses should serve as a great primer on your path to becoming a tweet embedding ninja.

1. Showcase Customer Testimonials - In the past, businesses who received a positive comment on Twitter could "favorite" it on their account by clicking the yellow star, but that really didn't do much for them to showcase that awesome feedback. Now, if someone tweets at you with some kind words, you can embed that tweet on your product or case study pages to add credibility to prospects investigating your business.

2. Curate Awesome Content for a Blog Post - Sometimes the best blog posts come from the knowledge of experts outside of your company. Ask industry experts a question. Use the question as a title of your blog post, and then embed the tweets to support the text you were planning to write about the subject.

3. Encourage Sharing of Lead Generation Offers - Look at your marketing analytics, and determine if Twitter is an important source of leads and traffic for your business. If it is, then you might want to consider embedding a tweet on your landing page for a lead generation offer that encourages visitors to retweet and share the offer.

4. Conduct a Social Poll - Want to get feedback on an issue and do it in a way that leverages the virality of social networks? Create a poll question in a blog post. Make each of the responses individual tweets, and have visitors retweet the tweet they are voting for. This helps you collect valuable feedback and spread the poll to the followers of each of your participants.

5. Event Summary Blog Posts - One of the best things to do after attending a trade show is to write a summary post of everything you learned and mention people that you chatted with. Embedded tweets make this type of blog post even easier. Embed your favorite tweets from people you met at the event. This will not only help them get more followers and retweets, but also encourage them to share your summary post.

6. Create a More Social Newsroom - Too many company newsrooms are boring. A cluttered page of press release links and executive headshots doesn't sell a reporter on the awesomeness of your company. Embed tweets from customers, partners, and industry influencers talking about your business to give reporters visiting your newsroom an improved perception of your company.

7. Build More Social Emails - Embedded tweets are nothing more than a little bit of HTML code. This means that you can embed them anywhere you use HTML. Use HTML email templates? Then you can socialize your email newsletter by embedding relevant tweets!

These are just a few ways to use Twitter's awesome new embedded tweets feature. Do you have other suggestions? Please leave them in the comments.

Image Credit: JoshSemans