Twitter now offers a simple button that you can add to your website to help visitors easily share your content on Twitter. Here’s why this “official” Twitter button may be better than your current solution:

• It displays the number of times a particular link has been shared on Twitter – this makes it easy for your visitors to quickly guess the popularity of your content.
• It uses t.co for shortening links (see example). Since t.co is owned by Twitter, your shortened links are likely to stay around for a long long time.
• When someone shares your page on Twitter, you have an option to recommend him up to two Twitter accounts after he is done sending the tweet. That may help you win new followers who may otherwise not know that you even exist on Twitter.

Insert the Tweet Button in HTML without JavaScript

Twitter offers a JavaScript based button but you can also write the same as a simple HTML link. The advantage is that it won’t add any extra weight to your blog and you’ll also be able to use it in places where JavaScript is not supported (like your email newsletter).

Here’s an example of such a link – Tweet This.

If you are on WordPress (the self hosted version), you can add the following code anywhere in your template (single.php):

<a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=<?php echo urlencode(the_permalink()); ?>&amp;text=<?php echo urlencode(the_title()); ?>&amp;via=blogaccount&amp;related=myaccount">Tweet this</a>

If you are on Blogger, the code will be something like this. Search for the class “post-footer” in the Blogger XML template and copy-paste this snippet somewhere near it.

<a expr:href='"http://twitter.com/share?text=" + data:post.title + "&amp;url=" + data:post.url + "&amp;via=blogaccount&amp;related=myaccount"'>Tweet this!</a>

Remember to replace the word blogaccount with the Twitter handle of your blog (example, labnol_BLOG) and myaccount with your own Twitter handle (example, labnol).

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