How to Properly Add Twitter Support to Your Blog

by Matt on November 16, 2009

I, like most people in my Twitter stream, love to tweet links. I do this both to share what I find interesting and useful on the internet, and as a personal bookmarking service that I can reference later.

I browse the internet quickly. A lot of tabs open all the time and usually Mad Men in the background. This means that when I click a link in my Twitter stream or my RSS reader, I won’t get to it for a little bit. When I get there, if I find it interesting, I’d like to send it along to my Twitter pals. The biggest thing that makes me NOT share a link is poor on-page Twitter sharing functionality.

Here’s are 3 tips to encourage tweets (from me, anyway) of your blog post:

1. Get TweetMeme

It’s classy looking, easy to spot, easy to implement, adds social proof, and gives readers an easy way to share your post.

2. Change the @user

I don’t @reply TweetMeme, as it’s set on default. TweetMeme is a great tool, but it did not write the post and should not get credit. Go to the settings and make sure that your Twitter username is behind the @. Sounds simple. but I encounter this a lot.

3. Write a good headline

First of all, make sure there are capitals. A link without capitals will look out of place on my stream and thus will not become a part of it. Also make sure that it properly describes the post and is interesting sounding. When I click a link to tweet a post, I don’t want to have to edit it. We move too fast here on the Internet; no time for that. Check out CopyBlogger for headline tips if you need them.

So those are 3 very easy ways to ensure you’re tweted. Make sure these are taken care of, write and market quality content, and you should be on your way to Twitter stardom.

Do you have any other tips or resources? Let me know in the comments.


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  • Ok I will go ahead and risk sounding stupid: I can't get TweetMeme to work right for me (Yes I know, I should go the plugin developer but thought you might humor me here ;))! First, if I Tweet my post, using TinyURL, the TweetMeme count (sometimes) does not show up. Second, I can never show all who have Tweeted when I go to say 4 Tweets. My screen shows only "Popular TweetMeme" newsfeed or what have you. Drives me insane! I gotta figure it out.......It's me I know it's me!!!
  • 3 things:

    1. TweetMeme counter sometimes fails. I get a few missed tweets in almost all of my counts. It's not often but it happens. Also they don't count using the Twitter Retweet function as far as I know.

    2. It will only show the record of tweets for the past 7 days. So if you go to one that hasn't been tweeted for >7 days it will not show any. I checked your latest posts and they people who tweeted are there.

    3. It will only show one tweet per person. So if someone has tweeted the link 3 times, it will only count as 1.

    If you find it failing more than it succeeds, and it isn't showing the right count even within 7 days, and many people are tweeting it, then you should check with Tweet Meme as you said.
  • Oh. Apparently it does show up when someone uses the official RT function. I don't know why I thought it didn't. Hm.
  • thank you for the information here!!! So kind of you to get back to me, and I was sure the 7 days can be modified but alas, no such luck!!!
  • I like your point about "Tweetmeme" because as you said they don't write the post so should not get credit of it. I have changed mine to @sitereviver :)

    I also like to share this post to the readers because if they are using Twitter they must use it properly. Here is my post on "How Twitter Can Kill Your Business"

    http://www.sitereviver.com/how-twitter-can-kill...

    Thanks
  • I see the tweetMeme everywhere, but only about half of the time are the settings changed so that the author's name appears behind the @ symbol. Details, details... oh so important. Glad you mentioned that!
  • Exactly. I've tweeted about it a few times but it's really a pet peeve of mine. I don't like having to change it myself. It's such an easy change to implement as a webmaster.
  • I am using the TweetMeMe and I like it!
  • I already have Tweetme on my blog and its nice.
  • I implemented TweetMeme on all my Blogger blogs last month (changing @TweetMeme to @dennis_jernberg, of course), and I haven't been able to blog without it since. For one thing, I can see at once just how much impact each of my blog posts has had. For another, I can retweet my own posts, changing the default text to more what I want (e.g., "RT @dennis_jernberg" to "Classic blog post:").
  • Cool little list there Matt. Personally, I don't use TweetMeMe on my main blog (but I do intend to implement it very soon), but the results I had on one of my old blogs were staggering. I was receiving around 50 visits/day, but still managed to get 20-30 RTs through the tweet button! :)
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