Twitter is all the rage these days and it doesn’t seem like it will be going anywhere any time soon. With that said, it often surprises me that many WordPress blog owners don’t offer a convenient way for their readers to retweet their content. Anyone can grab a Twitter WordPress plugin to tweet their new content as it is published, but what about your older content?
Rather than passing up all that potential traffic, I’ve found that offering a link somewhere within your post (optimally at the bottom of each post) is a great way to help your readers and incoming search engine traffic to promote your content for you. When people find great content they like to share it with others, so why not make it easy for them?
<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Click to send this page to Twitter!" target="_blank">Tweet This!</a>This code works just fine, but is not the most optimal solution in my opinion. Depending on the permalink structure your WordPress blog uses, combined with the length of your domain name, it may be difficult to fit the link into a 140 character tweet. It also doesn’t leave room for the person to add their own comments to the tweet.
As a proposed solution, I recommend using some WordPress code like the following:
<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @HackWordPress <?php the_title ();?> <?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/?p=<?php the_ID(); ?>">Tweet This</a>This code will automatically insert the “RT” and your Twitter account name (the above example uses our Twitter account, @Thangno) then use the ID form of your post with the tweet. When people click the link in the tweet, they will then be redirected to the actual post using your blog’s selected permalink structure, making a convenient and typically short URL.
