Hello Tweet Button: The Importance of Easy Sharing

Posted August 16th 2010 @ 2:11 pm by Jerod

Recently, Twitter jumped into the easy sharing pool by releasing the official tweet button. Joining the Facebook “like” button, Twitter has made it easy for folks coming to your website to share your stuff on their favorite social media outlets. Here’s a quick intro video from Twitter about the new button.

Twitter has also made it really easy to add the button to a webpage even if you don’t know a lot of code. Through the Twitter website, you can enter some basic information and Twitter will generate the code for you to paste into your website. Twitter also lets you choose some basic things like button layout, tweeted message that will appear after the button is clicked and suggested people to follow. Of course there are instructions for more tech savvy people to automatically add the button to all your pages so you don’t have to do it manually each time you write something new.

The idea of making it easy for users to share your content isn’t new. Tweetmeme has been letting users do it for awhile and now they’re working with Twitter to support the new button. Plus there are lots of other tools like ShareThis, which we use on Church Juice, that let you give your readers the power to easily pass along the things they like on your site in multiple formats.

So why is this important?

Word of mouth is the best marketing you can get. People trust recommendations from their friends more than anything else.

It’s mostly free. Many of these sharing tools are free. The only cost you have is the time your web person puts in to set them up. Some content management systems, like WordPress, make it easy for you to just plug in these buttons as a regular feature.

You’re helping people take you with them into the community where they already are. People are already spending a lot of time on Facebook and Twitter. This helps them take your content and integrate it into the place where they already like to be.

You get full integration. This closes the circle in social sharing. For example, you can use Facebook as a way to bring people to your website and you can use your website to take people to you social media outlets.

Here are some links to various sharing button options as well as an example to show how they look. For the most part, they’re easy to add since their sites will give you the code to insert. (If you're a WordPress user, you may need to stick with using plugins to add these social sharing tools because of the way WordPress reads code.) Remember, you don't need to add all of these, just use what works best for your site and users.