Tweet this!

Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

This is just a very quick article of no real substance, but that I thought I’d share for all you Twittering bloggers out there. You may have noticed a few weeks ago I added a simple link at the end of every article in order for readers to quickly Tweet the current post with a link and my Twitter username. A very small and trivial addition, which seems to have had massive benefits!

The code for this very subtle addition is simply:

<code><p><a href="http://twitter.com/?status=<?php the_title(); ?>%20by%20@csswizardry%20<?php the_permalink() ?>">Please Tweet this article</a>, it'd be surely appreciated.</p></code>

Above: Note the use of the Wordpress template tags.

There we have it, just a simple textual link with a personal-sounding message. This is so trivial that I didn’t actually bother putting any metrics into place to track its effectiveness. However, one thing I have noticed is that that subtle, textual link with a polite message (I didn’t want a garish ‘Tweet me now!’ kind of button as that wouldn’t have sat properly with the way I’ve done the rest of CSS Wizardry) has had quite a noticeable impact on articles’ tweet rates. It seems to be very very effective!

So yeah, basically if you’re wondering how effective something such as that might be, I’d say very–although I don’t have numbers to prove it….

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

By Harry Roberts

Harry Roberts is an independent consultant web performance engineer. He helps companies of all shapes and sizes find and fix site speed issues.