How To: Adding a “Tweet This” Button to Your WordPress Theme

By Kyle Eslick on November 6th, 2008 | Filed Under Hacks
Tag(s): Twitter, WordPress Code, WordPress Hacks, WordPress How-To

Are you following the WordPress Recipes blog? If not, you really should be! My fellow blogger and friend Jean-Baptiste Jung has created this blog to feature a number of “recipes” or code snippets. In addition to the content, he’s also got a great design that has been getting attention all throughout the blogosphere.

In his latest recipe, Jean explains how to add a “Send to Twitter” link to your blog, or what I prefer to call it, a “Tweet This!” link. The idea is to add a link on your blog (usually below the content) that people can simply click to discuss the post on Twitter.

If you’d like to add a “Tweet This!” link to your blog, here is the code you’ll need:

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Click to send this page to Twitter!" target="_blank">Tweet This!</a>

I would think that this could potentially be another great way to fetch traffic, possibly even better than a “Digg This!” link or something else along those lines.

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There Are 14 Responses So Far. »

1 Missy@Net Media Blog
Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 8:48 pm

I use Twitter daily and it is a great tool to network with other bloggers.

I don’t think i’ve seen many re-tweets on Twitter from a blog though. I wonder how it looks. Maybe i’ve just not noticed. This brings up a good question.

How does a re-tweet from a reader/visitor on Twitter look like?

Hmmmn. Will have to find out.

P.S. Jean from WPRecipes totally rocks. As Matt from WP says, “Code is Poetry”.
2 Richard X. Thripp
Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 8:51 pm

Awesome, I had this idea too! I created Tweet This, a WP plugin, to do this. It shortens URLs in advance through Th8.us, TinyURL, or other services (you can choose).
3 Virginia Will by Andrew
Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 9:41 pm

That’s some handy code! Thanks for the great tip.

I think Twitter can definitely be an important marketing tool for bloggers. This helps that even more.
4 jbj
Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 1:03 am

Many thanks to Kyle for the article, and to both of you for the comments!
5 Markus
Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 6:40 am

I have done this with twitthis.com, where I can choose between some stauses. The code is:
< a href="http://twitthis.com/twit?url=" title="Click to send this page to Twitter!" target="_blank" >Tweet This!
6 TYCP Entertainment Magazine
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 11:56 pm

Thanks for this. I’d rather have this than a plugin because it’s so simple.
7 p@r@noid
Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 2:06 pm

Sweet really helpful!
8 AsceticMonk
Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 5:24 pm

Thanks for this! I will be using this in my new blog theme.
9 Gaurav
Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 9:27 pm

hey thanks man.. i need this code….
10 areisdesigns
Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 6:24 pm

Thanks for this! I am adding to my blog now!