How To Get People Tweeting About You
By Anna Johnson on April 28th, 2009One way to get more Twitter followers, generate more traffic to your website, and at the very least, incite a little ‘buzz’ about you, is to have lots of people ‘tweeting’ about you on Twitter.
So how do you get Twitter users – including those who may not necessarily follow you – to tweet or retweet about you?
Well, apart from inspiring people with exciting, insightful, provocative, controversial or otherwise newsworthy information… it helps to ‘prompt’ people by strategically implementing buttons or other techniques to encourage them to tweet or retweet about you.
Ann Smarty recently wrote an article that outlines three ways you can utilize buttons to encourage people to tweet your content. Here are just three ideas she mentions:
1. If you run a WordPress blog, install a plugin that automatically places a ‘tweet this’ button beneath your blog posts.
There are a few plugins that accomplish this, including Sociable (which includes a Twitter option along with many other social bookmarks) and the TweetThis! Button. If you do a search on ‘Twitter’ at WordPress.org you’ll undoubtedly come up with a few buttons to choose from.
2. Tailor messages to web visitors coming from Twitter.
By implementing a tool such as ‘Referrer Detector’ (http://www.phoenixheart.net/2008/11/referrer-detector/) you can display a message that addresses visitors coming to your site from Twitter and thereby encourages them to tweet your post.
3. Create your own link or button.
If you’re posting articles to third party article sites, for example, and are able to include an external link, consider prompting readers to tweet those articles. Helpfully, Ann provides some HTML code you can use for this purpose, so be sure to check out her article.
