Spreading your content through Twitter just got easier

For all you businesses trying to connect with people and gain exposure through social media, we have good news: Twitter has just reduced the barriers to sharing your content to almost zero.

With third party applications from the likes of TweetDeck and TweetMeme, the barriers were already pretty low, but Twitter’s new Tweet Button makes sharing content about as easy as it can get. Which is good because when it comes to web surfing, people have extremely short attention spans.

The new service is a button you install on your blog posts, articles or other web content that lets visitors share what they find interesting without leaving the page. A box pops up that logs you into Twitter, and from that box you can Tweet a pre-shortened URL with your own message. And after they’ve tweeted about you to their followers, they receive a couple suggestions of people to follow. You get to decide yourself who is suggested to them, so the social media exposure becomes two-fold as you can gain both buzz and followers.

Installing the button is fairly simple. You need to go to the Tweet Button webpage, choose a size and layout, enter the accounts you want Tweet Button to recommend, and then copy and paste a couple lines of code into the html of your blog or website. Here’s a short video on getting started with Tweet Button.

The new service also lets you track how many retweets your content gets by showing you a running counter. This will help you better understand what content your audience finds most compelling and refocus your efforts. As we’ve discovered over the course of writing this blog and other projects, predicting what will take off through social media is no mean feat even for experienced pros.

Getting others to share your content should be a top priority in your online efforts. It won't revolutionize your social media efforts as your success still hinges on creating exceptional content, but we’d recommend implementing the new Tweet Button since fewer steps in the sharing process equals more people doing it. You can give the button a try here on Methodical Madness below.

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

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