Twitter tips: Adding a “Tweet This” link to Web site

A great way to get the word out about your Web site or some content on your site is to get people to tweet about it. The problem is that it requires quite a few steps to construct a tweet about a site or page. Here are the general procedures:

 1.  Navigate to the page and copy the page address.

 2.  Switch to Twitter and paste the address in the update text box.

 3.  Return to the page and copy the page title.

 4.  Head back to Twitter and paste the title in the update text box.

 5.  Add your own text and then send the tweet.

Whew! However, you can do your would-be tweeters a favor by helping them to condense steps 1 to 4 into a single click of a link, which ought to make them more willing to tweet about your site.I’m talking here about creating a “Tweet This” link (or perhaps “Tweet This Site” or “Tweet This Post” or whatever fits your situation), which you place strategically on your pages (for example, at the end of a blog post or article).

If you use an online editor provided by your Web host, place the cursor where you want the link to appear and add the link text (such as “Tweet This”). Select the text, click the editor’s link tool, and then type the following general address:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Title (URL )”

Here, replace  Title  with the title of the page, post, article or whatever, and replace  URL with the address of the item. Here’s an example:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Word Spy (http://wordspy.com)”

If you need to edit HTML to add the link, open the page or file in your HTML editor, place the cursor where you want the link to appear, and then type the link using the following HTML code:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Title (URL )”>

Tweet This

</a>

Again, replace Title  with the item title, and replace URL with the item address. Here’s an example:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Word Spy (http://wordspy.com)”>Tweet about Word Spy

</a>

Figure 7.3 shows how this code creates a Tweet about the Word Spy link on my site. If a tweeter clicks that link, the browser switches to Twitter, asks the user to sign in, if he isn’t already, and then displays the specified text in the What are you doing? box, as shown in figure 7.4. Now all the tweeter has to do is add his or her own text and fire off the update.

" Adding a “Tweet This” link to Web site "

Reference : wiley.com