Encourage Readers to ReTweet Your Posts

One of the most popular uses of Twitter is to share links to great websites or blog posts you have read. By adding a ReTweet button to the top of each of your blog posts, you encourge your readers to share your post with other Twitter users.

See what happens when you click on the green ReTweet button at the top of this blog post (you have to have a twitter account). Basically a Twitter post appears automatically in your status update box with RT@nzwebwoman (I have used my username in this example), the title of your blog post and a link to the post This can be the actual url if it’s not too long or a shortened url from tinyurl etc.

Why Add a RetweetLink?

All the followers of the person who posted your retweet see the update as well as anyone searching Twitter for keywords/phrases in your posts title. These people can do any of the following:

• Retweet themselves so all their followers see it (and so on and so on)
• Click on the RT@yourusername and go straight to your Twitter page
• Click on the url/post address and go direct to your blog post

Option 1:Get a Tweetmeme Button

The most popular and easy to install Retweet Plugin at the moment is the Tweetmeme Plugin (see the green box at the top of my posts). This plugin also displays how many times each post has been retweeted (a great way to see what’s popular.

1. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetmeme/
2. Upload to your Plugins folder using ftp and activate on your website.
3. Go to the Tweetmeme admin page under Settings inside your WordPress admin.
4. Choose to add the button to the top, bottom or both of all your blog posts.
5. Add your twitter username and save the settings.

Option2: Add Retweet Plugin to Your Blog

1. Download the WordPress ReTweet Plugin…
2. Upload the twitter-retweet folder to your plugins folder using ftp.
3. Login to your WordPress website and activate the plugin.
4. Paste this code into your WordPress theme’s index.php or single.php file near the post date (inside the WordPress loop).
5. Go to Users in your WordPress admin and change the nickname field under your profile to your Twitter username.
6. Inside each of your posts where you want a ‘ReTweet This Post’ link, add a custom field called retweet_url (see screenshot below)
7. In the value box next to it, paste the full url address of your post or the tinyurl version of your post url.
8. Click Add Custom Field and save your post.

NOTES:
If your url combined with your blog post title and username is longer than the allowed number of characters on Twitter, it will be cut off and wont work when clicked on. I would therefore recommend shortening your url before pasting into the custom field.
This plugin doesn’t seem to like the character ‘&’ in your post title so replace any of these with ‘and’ before adding your url to custom fields.

Because you set the retweet url for each of your posts, this plugin is also perfect for Google Analytics Campaign Tracking. Create your tracking url then paste into tinyurl to shorten it for Twitter.