One of the quickest and most successful things I did when we created a web page for my latest book, was to add a button that allowed people to click on it a then post a pre-written Tweet. It makes it really easy for people to Tweet what you want and removes the barrier of effort that’s normally required.
Here’s an example pre-written tweet button followed by the step by step instructions:
Pre-written tweet example
Next you need to encode this Tweet so its ‘URL friendly’ (this basically means the spaces and some other characters are replaced). Go to http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ and paste in your Tweet. Then click on ‘Encode’ and copy the resulting text to your clipboard.
After encoding:
This%20is%20an%20example%20of%20a%20pre-written%20tweet-%20don%27t%20forget%20that%20it%20needs%20to%20be%20less%20than%20280%20characters…
Now you just need to add the following text to the beginning of the encoded text:
https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=
So this:
This%20is%20an%20example%20of%20a%20pre-written%20tweet-%20don%27t%20forget%20that%20it%20needs%20to%20be%20less%20than%20280%20characters…
becomes:
https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=This%20is%20an%20example%20of%20a%20pre-written%20tweet-%20don%27t%20forget%20that%20it%20needs%20to%20be%20less%20than%20280%20characters…
Last step – you now just need to link to this long URL that you have created. You can do this on a normal text link or on an image to create a button. Here is an example link and you can see the code below:
<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=This%20an%20example%20of%20a%20pre-written%20tweet%20-%20don%27t%20forget%20it%20needs%20to%20be%20less%20than%20280%20characters….″</a>
A great little tip is to paste this long URL into a URL shortner (my favourite is bit.ly and the you can include the pre-written tweet in a tweet or use the shortened URL anywhere else. Test it out and be sure to share it with your followers on Twitter! Enjoy.
