Life with Technology

It is one of the most important things you should add to each of your blog posts. Yes, I’m talking about sharing and social bookmarking buttons. There are a number of plugins you can use to add social bookmarking and/or sharing options at the bottom/top of your posts. Almost all of the social media sharing options do have retweeting options. Still you need to add an extra retweet button to your blog. Because people are extremely busy nowadays. They will not take time to retweet your post unless it takes a single click only. An extra retweet button can only make your readers retweet your article by just a click.

I recommend TweetMeme

So far, I found TweetMeme to be the best ReTweet buttons you can have on your blog posts. TweetMeme button has a few designs. You can choose to show how many times the post has been retweeted. Once a twitter user clicks the “Retweet” button, TweetMeme will redirect him to twitter homepage and will include a shortened URL and the title of your blog post at the “Update Status” box of twitter. It makes retweeting a whole lot easier. It’s important because you need to make your post user-friendly to share on social networking sites which, include but not limited to, facebook, twitter, myspace etc.

Add a TweetMeme button to WordPress

Adding a retweet button to your wordpress blog takes a few moments only. Please follow these simple steps to add a retweet button:

• Click here to download TweetMeme WordPress plugin. You can install the plugin to your wordpress directory from the option “Plugins” > “Add New” and search for “TweetMeme”. Click to install and then activate the plugin.
• You will notice an extra option named “Tweetmeme” which will have two sub-menus named “Settings” & “Statistics”. From the “Setting” sub-menu, you can change the settings such as where to show the button, e.g., at the top or at the bottom of the post. You can check your statistics from the “Statistics” Sub-menu.

And that’s all! ReTweet button from TweetMeme has been successfully installed and activated on your WordPress blog. It should now appear on each post.

For Blogger-hosted Blogs

As always, adding a ReTweet button to blogger-hosted blog is also a little bit complex. You have to mess with complex codes for a while. But don’t worry; it’s simple (not simpler than WordPress, of course!).

Find out the place

Go to your Blogger dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML. You will see the entire code of the template you’re currently using in your blogger-hosted blog. Click the Download button to keep a backup of your Template. Please note: It is strongly recommended that you keep a backup so that you can recover your blog if something goes wrong while you change the coding.

Find out the place where to put codes

When you’ve made a backup of your template, please be prepared to work with codes. Check the “Expand Widget Templates” check box. Now, search for the following line in your template source code. You can use Firefox Find option (Ctrl + F) for faster seach.

<div class='post-header-line-1'/>

Code you should place

Copy the given code below and paste it in your template. The code should sit right above the line you’ve searched and found out. Inserting the following code into your template will place a full retweet button (retweet button below and count of how many times the post has been retweeted. See the lower right corner of this post for an example).

<div style='float:right; padding: 5px 5px 5px 5px'>
<script type='text/javascript'>
tweetmeme_url=&#39;<data:post.url/>&#39;;
</script>
<script src='http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js' type='text/javascript'>
</script> </div>

Customizing the button

You can customize the ReTweet button by making a short modification in the code.

1. Place the code at the left side of the post: In the first line of the code, change the word float:right to float:left.
2. Specify your twitter username in retweets instead of default @Tweetmeme: Add an extra line right above the first

</script>

of the main code. The code is:

tweetmeme_source ='Your User Account';

Please change the “Your User Account” with your twitter username (without the @). Make sure the & sits next to the last letter of your username. For example, my twitter id is @aisajib and I’d change the code as follows:

<div style='float:right; padding: 5px 5px 5px 5px'>
<script type='text/javascript'>
tweetmeme_url=&#39;<data:post.url/>&#39;;
tweetmeme_source =&#39;AISAJIB&#39;; 
</script>
<script src='http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js' type='text/javascript'>
</script> </div>

3. Replace the URL shortener service: You can manually select which service should tweetmeme use to shorten your post’s URL. By default it is bit.ly. If you want to change it, you can add another line right below the line you specified your twitter username. The line will be as follows:

tweetmeme_service = 'Your-url-shortener';

Change the “Your-URL-Shortener” phrase with the service you want to use. E.g., bit.ly, tinyurl.com etc.
Example

tweetmeme_service = 'tinyurl.com';

Have your say

Have you been using retweet button in your blog posts? Have you noticed any significant improvement by using an extra button dedicated to retweeting only? Do you agree with me that it is worth adding an extra retweet button even if your addtoany or other related plugins provide retweeting option? Kick things off by filling out the smart comment section below.

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