Want to give your readers a way to tweet your posts?

I have been spending a TON of time on Twitter the past couple of months. And I've noticed that Twitter is an incredibly value channel for letting people discover my blog. In fact, Twitter is now easily the top site for referral traffic to my blog.

In light of this, I started looking for a way to let readers automatically tweet my posts to Twitter. I looked for a plugin, and couldn't really find one. So I started playing around with code from similar plugins for Delicious, etc, and think I've got a crude workaround.

As you can see, each blog post now has a 'Tweet This!' link below the comments section of the post. if you click that link, it will take you to Twitter and let you tweet a link to this post! Like I said it's basic, but gets the job done.

Here's the code I added to the blog's template to make this happen:

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$> via @mackcollier's The Viral Garden">Tweet This!</a>

Now there's a couple of caveats. First, notice that I added my Twitter name and blog's name to the code. You'll want to change both to your Twitter name, and blog name. I tried adding the post title as well, but it was too long. I would advise that you make it a bit unique so you can track how often people are tweeting it via your blog. And with the reply, you'll also get notified when someone tweets via your blog post.

Second, this code adds the 'Tweet This!' message at the end of the post. You can also change this to whatever message you want.

Third, you have to be careful to put the code in the right place in your blog's template. Here's a screenshot of where it goes in mine:



Basically, put it right above the End .post portion. You may need to do some trial and error with the code's placement to make sure you get it just right. Remember, Preview is your friend! Check it early and often to make sure you've got the code exactly how you want it before you save it.

So there you go! Like I said I had been looking for a way to add the ability to tweet my posts, and I thought I'd share the code with you. As I said above, it's still very crude, and I'm sure you could add a pic and probably enable URL shortening as well, that's just something that's over my head. If you add it to your Blogger blog, let me know how it goes!

PS: My blog still has the 'old' version of the template, because I couldn't update to the 'new' version and use the blog theme I have now. So if you have the updated version of Blogger, you might not find the same code in your template that I have. Try to put it somewhere near the end of the Post portion of the template code, and it should work!