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:
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
Having got rid of sharebar due to its slow load time this seems like the perfect alternative. Anything which reduces my sites dependency on external servers when it loads is a win in my book!
Cheers
P.S Integrating the url encoder is probably quite difficult but you could easily replicate its functionality with something like regex.
Glad you like it Ben! I haven’t heard of regex – I’ll have to look into it.
regex stand for regular expression. It is a way to process strings using patterns when you are programming.
I like how you’ve said that on the assumption that I’ll have any clue what you’re talking about
On the plus side, encoding is now built in, and more features may be in the pipeline!
Sorry about that assumption, but I am glad it is working for you.
I was only pulling your leg
thanks!
Yeah Tom, I’m tending to find that retweeting blog posts is more appropriate than Liking on Facebook, which would be my next choice regards to social media. I hit the “Tom Ewer bet me I wouldn’t tweet this…” so it worked for me! I’ll try the URL encoder thing, but being a tech no-hoper, let’s not hold our breath about me getting it right.
Jo
You should be okay Jo – it’s just copy and paste
If the plugin is popular I might develop a v2.0 with built in encoding and integration with the visual editor.
Joseph and anyone else intimidated by the URL encoder thing, don’t be. It’s simple, all you do is put your text in one field, hit the button and it spits it out in another field.
So,
This plain text has spaces
becomes
This%20plain%20text%20has%20spaces
That’s it!
I suspect in Tom’s plugin that it’s not the spaces, rather characters like: /
The plugin is a neat idea Tom!
Thanks Stephen, and thanks for the clarification on the encoding!
Great idea Tom. I think people are getting so used to seeing the little Twitter icons around the web now that it is almost akin to ‘banner blindness’. It’s not to say that they don’t work – just that people’s motivation for clicking them isn’t that high.
The idea of disrupting what people are used to and embedding a call to action to tweet within a post is very clever. Thanks for sharing man.
No problem Jon; my pleasure!
Took me a second to figure out I had to click that ‘Pay’ button to get your plugin, but I’m glad I soldiered through it
Glad to hear you made it through
This seems like a great idea Tom! Thank you for the information. I’m planning to use this some time in my sites.
Spatch Merlin
More Web Site Traffic Guide
No problem Spatch
Tom
Thank you for great content! Much appreciated!
I feel a bit disconcerted by the “pay it with a Twitt” and “threatened” even as a European into being pushed into something that could come accross a bit “stingy” and not generous? I know this is not your attitude at all but wanted to be a bit provocative and not always write “nice things”! A bit of healthy and constructive comment is sometime better than empty praises that do not mean a lot? What do you think?
Should not the the reader decide for him or herself if they want to promote you or not?
Kind Regards from this side of the pond!
@brunogebarski
PS would you please sign up your blog to “DISQUS” service? for us to register much quicker? It is free and very practical as you most likely know: Thank you
Hi Bruno,
I’m not sure what you mean by threatened or pushy, as it is of course your choice as to whether or not you want to download whatever I happen to be offering. Ideally people would tweet your post if they liked your content, but that isn’t always the case!
Cheers,
Tom
Simple + Effective = Winner (thanks)
Glad you like it Daniel!
Hi, Tom.
I have read your code and make changes so tweet variable will be automatically encoded for url. I sent an email with attachment to you.
By the way, thanks for sharing this plugin.
Tito – thanks again for helping – I really appreciate it!
What a fabulous site you have here. I recently installed your easy tweet embed plugin on a few WordPress sites. I am a writer and an eBusiness Manager for Creative Type people — mostly writers and artists. You may leave work behind, but creative type people have a passion to create so much so that they do not have the ability not to create. They need the time in their businesses to do what they do best and someone else who has the same kind of passion to help them to promote themselves. Your plugin is a necessary tool to help promote them easily. Thank you so much for your contribution.
My pleasure Paula