Let’s talk about a little tool that will make your blog articles much more… shareable: Click to Tweet boxes.
How many times did you ever read an amazing piece of content which had an absolutely sharable line that you went through all the trouble to copy it, open Twitter, paste it, find the source’s handle to tag, and eventually publish it for your followers to enjoy the awesomeness as well?
Once? Twice?… or maybe never?!
Don’t worry, I’m feeling you! But if you wouldn’t do it, why would you expect your readers do it?
Inherently, us humans are a lazy bunch. Even if you had the most tweetable content in the world, rarely a reader would go through all the lengthy process of actually spreading the word out there about it.
So why not make it so simple that they just can’t avoid sharing it?
Click to Tweet boxes, or “tweetable quotes” as many know them, are one of the best ways you can encourage your readers to share your content on Twitter.
Don’t know exactly what a Click to Tweet box is?
Just look below. Dare click it.
Click to Tweet boxes are one of the best ways you can encourage your readers to share your content on Twitter.Basically, this tool helps you highlight the exact phrases that you want tweeted. Therefore, it makes it insanely easy for your readers to share your content with their Twitter followers – all they need is to “Click” the button.
Pretty convenient, right?!
And because of this convenience the feature has become more and more popular over the years.
The main advantages of a Click to Tweet box
- Easy to click and highly visible. The “Click to Tweet” message acts as a call to action; if the highlighted message is worth sharing, you just got yourself a new mention on Tweeter (and maybe a few new followers too!)
- You can customise the message, thus having control over what gets shared. As we mentioned previously, keep in mind that the message has to be worth sharing. Make it funny, quirky, smart and/or useful.
- Having a predefined message helps the reader decide more quickly what to share.
Did we convince you? Ready to jump on board? Then let’s teach you how to easily setup a Click to Tweet box on your own website.
How to add a Click to Tweet box to your WordPress website
Given the open source nature of WordPress you will find a handful of free Click to Tweet plugins available. Most can do the job and save you some money, but for this tutorial we are going to use Social Pug Pro, a full fledged social media plugin, for three main reasons:
- it has one of the best, if not the best, Click to Tweet module of any existing social sharing plugin;
- being premium gives much more of a guarantee that the plugin will be supported in the future, whereas with free plugins this is an uncertainty;
- it has beautiful social sharing and follow buttons, so all social media related features are provided by just one plugin. This means more consistency throughout your website design.
Setting up the general settings
To help you get started as quickly as possible, Social Pug will add by default the basic general settings for you when you activate the plugin.
These settings will be applied to all Click to Tweet boxes from your WordPress website, so if you by any chance want to change the look and feel of the boxes, all of them will be in sync and your website’s design will be consistent throughout.
Adding a Click to Tweet box to a post
The Click to Tweet box is essentially generated by a shortcode that has a few parameters which you can customize to your liking.
But, to make it super easy for you to insert the shortcodes wherever in your post’s content, Social Pug adds a small new button to WordPress’s default text editor. This will triggers a pop-up with all the options you can customize.
The only required field from the set of options is “The Tweet that will be shared on Twitter”. As the label of the field says, this will be the tweet displayed and the one that your readers will be able to share.
The plugin by default takes care of the rest to make the tweet as sweet as possible:
- it automatically adds the post’s URL to the end of the tweet. If you’ve connected Bitly to Social Pug the URL will be automatically shortened;
- it automatically adds your Twitter username at the end of the tweet.
It’s this easy to add a Click to Tweet box to your WordPress article. Start taking advantage of this powerful feature and guide your users into sharing your content with their Twitter followers.
Let us know in a comment below your thoughts about Click to Tweet boxes!