Social share buttons enable readers to easily share your blog posts to their friends and followers. You can install a social sharing plugin or module for your WordPress, Drupal, or other content management system (CMS) that will make it easy to include this functionality on every page of your website. Three popular social sharing services with CMS plugins are Shareaholic, AddThis, and ShareThis.

But is that the only option you should give your readers? What about a click-to-tweet option?

When a reader shares your content through a social sharing button, the service posts the title and link of the article. While we should always try to make page titles enticing and meaningful, we should also find a balance that will satisfy search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. This typically involves using the article’s primary keyword phrase at the beginning of the page title and limiting the page title to no more than 70 characters. Such a balance can be challenging if you are targeting long tail keywords.

That’s where quotable content can come in handy.

Make Quotable Content Sharable

I love reading and sharing content about public relations, digital marketing, and social media. Many of the articles I share include pithy opinions, statistics, or facts from case studies that are more interesting than the page title. When I run across such material, I sometimes copy the snippet of content and paste into my tweets.

Why not make it easy for your readers to do the same?

I found a few plugins for WordPress that will create click-to-tweet links. I chose the Inline Tweet Sharer by Winwar Media because it works well and integrates with Bitly. While this plugin works great for blog posts, I haven’t found an equivalent feature for email marketing systems like iContact, Constant Contact, and MailChimp.

Click-to-Tweet Code

I recently sent an email to promote a social media awareness campaign as part of a coalition effort. The email included three elements that I believe improved its performance compared to other emails sent to the same list of subscribers.

1. I used the words “2 Tweets to Support [cause]” in the email subject
2. I included the campaign hashtag in the subject of the email
3. I included click-to-tweet links in the body of the email with calls to action

We saw a 39.2% increase in open rate and the click rate was the third largest so far this year, surpassed only by a survey request and a video link. We also saw a 211.5% increase in social mentions from subscribers clicking on the click-to-tweet links and sharing our messages on Twitter.

UPDATE: I found a website that makes creating social sharing links super-easy, and it’s free: http://www.sharelinkgenerator.com/ 

I had no plugin to make the click-to-tweet link, so I learned the code. It’s rather simple, so I’ll share it here:

1. The first part is the Twitter tweet code: https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=
2. Enter your text after “?text=”
3. Replace # with hex code %23
4. Replace @ with hex code %40
5. Use other hex codes for special characters, like % or $

For example, if I want to tweet “We saw a 39.2% increase in open rate – by @johnjanney #click2tweet” and include a shortened URL for the article, the code will be:

If you worry about line breaks or spaces breaking your code (which is why I had to use an image in the above example), you can fill in the space between each word with %20. The resulting link will work the same, but will look like this:

<a href=”https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=We%20saw%20a%2039.2%25%20increase%20in%20open%20rate%20-%20by%20%40johnjanney%20http://bit.ly/1neNCXS%20%23click2tweet”>We saw a 39.2% increase in open rate</a>

DIY = Control

While plugins make tasks easy, sometimes you might prefer to have more control. Online content producers balance these trade-offs all the time. Content management systems, website themes, and social sharing plugins rarely satisfy every desire. As a result, public relations, digital marketing, and other online content producers should learn basic HTML and PHP to overcome the limitations imposed by content systems.

ClickToTweet.com

Alternatively, you can use ClickToTweet.com to generate your click-to-tweet code. This service offers up-to five free click-to-tweet links with shortened URL and click tracking services. If you want more than five links, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro Plan ($4.97 per month or $49.70 per year). You can also include an image with your code, and the service offers a WordPress plugin. Anum Hussain (@anum) at HubSpot wrote an article, How to Generate Click-to-Tweet Links for your Content, that guides you through the process. Here is an example of the final result (1) with and (2) without an image:

1. 
2. Tweet: Click-to-Tweet for Promoting Content & Causes http://ctt.ec/9irb_+ by @johnjanney #click2tweet

What do you think?

Should PR/MarCom professionals know HTML and PHP? Do you use click-to-tweet links in your email marketing? Do you use a click-to-tweet plugin and are you satisfied with it? Have you or will you use ClickToTweet.com? What results have you seen by including a hashtag in your email subjects? Are you integrating your email marketing and social media engagement efforts?

The post Click-to-Tweet Code for Promoting Your Content or Cause appeared first on John Janney.