How to add tweets / retweet buttons to your WordPress.com blog
Have you seen all the blogs with the tweets / retweet buttons? They make it very easy to spread the word about the blog posts you like, don’t they? Great SEO for bloggers, too. I wanted these buttons for my blog so I did some searching to find out how to add them. Here’s what I found.
Mirella McCracken had the easiest how to add a retweet button tutorial I’ve found; in fact, she had the only correct answer I have found anywhere! (Where did she get it, I wonder?)
I can add to Mirella’s post by saying that the answer is a shortcode. WordPress developed these since they don’t allow embedded scripts in WordPress.com blogs for security reasons. I learned about shortcodes when I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com. In a WordPress.com blog post, you can use a simple shortcode to embed a YouTube video or a Flickr video. What I didn’t know about was the TweetMeme shortcode.
The TweetMeme shortcode for WordPress.com looks like this:
For example, my twitter name is danielgreene, so my shortcode for “_# of_ tweets / retweet” button would be
It’s really quite easy. Facebook “Like” buttons, on the other hand, are not so easy. There is no shortcode for Facebook links that I know of yet. There are a few ways to get that “Like” button on your WordPress.com blog posts, but these services, such as GetSocial Live, require you to individually enter blog post titles and URLs into a web form to get a different button for each blog post. Then these buttons send the visitor who clicks them to a different page where they have to click something else. Sorry, but no. Not easy and seamless enough for me. I will wait until WordPress comes up with a Facebook shortcode; until then, I’m happy with the TweetMeme shortcode for Twitter.
Do you have a favorite method of helping your visitors spread the word about your blog posts?
Like this:
Posted on August 5, 2010, in Writing for the Web and tagged blogging, Facebook, how-to, tutorial, Twitter, WordPress, wordpress.com. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
Ah, of course, less than three weeks later, WordPress.com adds More ways to share and makes this whole discussion obsolete. Thanks, WordPress.com!
Really, though, I do appreciate the folks at WordPress who are constantly making blogging easier, better, and more fun.
Hey, news flash! WordPress.com just built a new Twitter “Tweet” Button into the dashboard. Now you can have WordPress.com automatically add a Tweet button to all your blog posts with one click. And it shows how many times people have tweeted it. Cool!
Thank you so much for mentioning my link
You have a lovely blog!
To answer your question about how I found it, I have no clue lol lol, in fact I tried different tutorials on Twitter and WordPress and the wordpress’ forum people suggested different tutorials, so I tried to simplify their suggestions to see if it works…and it did, voila!
It was a pleasure to share it with people like you and it makes happy to see you sharing it with your readers!
Mirella
Thanks, Mirella. Your post certainly helped me! I realized when I saw it that it was a shortcode, and I wonder why it’s not in the list yet. Oh well…