1 Simple Step To Increasing Your Blog Post Tweets By 27%

Update 14/07/12: You may be interested in reading this post from a historical point of view, but the original plugin discussed has been massively improved and is now available from the WordPress.org Plugins Directory. Download Easy Tweet Embed here!

If you are a regular reader of Leaving Work Behind, you will know that I am a big fan of Twitter. Back in September 2011, I published How To Use Twitter For Exponential Blog Growth, which was very well received at the time. And just last week I covered 3 methods for Twitter blog promotion that I use.

Although all three of the methods I revealed in that recent post were well received, the most popular by far seemed to be tweet embedding. I actually ran a little experiment on that blog post where I embedded a simple tweet:

Tom Ewer bet me I wouldn’t tweet this (tweet this).

To date, the post has been tweeted out 26 times. That embedded tweet has been tweeted out 7 times. I was able to increase my number of tweets by around 27% just by embedding a tweet. And that was with a rather cheeky experiment – I am sure you could increase that percentage if you were a bit more thoughtful about what you asked people to tweet!

So the method works, and it works well. But I quickly discovered that people were having problems with implementing it on their blog. And in fairness, it does require a little bit of technical knowledge. So I thought I would resolve that issue by producing a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to embed pre-formatted tweets with ease.

I call it Easy Tweet Embed. All you have to do when you want to embed a tweet is enter this shortcode in the WordPress Visual Editor:

That’s it! Although most tweets will render perfectly when entered in this manner, certain characters do throw a spanner in the works. So it is best practice to run your tweet through this URL encoder before you add it to the shortcode. If any clever programmer knows of a way to integrate this encoder with the plugin, get in touch!

Update 14/05/12: a very kind programmer by the name of Tito Pandu Brahmanto took the incredibly thoughtful step of including an encode function in the plugin, which means that you no longer have to worry about special characters making a mess of your tweet. Thank you Tito!

Let’s look at an example. Entering this in the Visual Editor:

Produces this:

Click here to Tweet!

Pretty cool, right? And it’s yours for free. Just a little token of my appreciation for your continued support of this blog. Just hit the Pay With A Tweet button below, let your followers know about the plugin, and it’s all yours!

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Picons