How to create a retweet text link for Twitter

There is now a multitude of scripts that allow you to add all sorts of sharing buttons to your pages, so visitors can easily share them with their social circle. ShareThis and AddThis are two good examples of sharing services. If you visited my blog in the past, you may have noticed the WordPress plugin (SexyBookmarks) I installed. It displays a range of sharing buttons at the bottom of each blog post. Pretty cool, isn’t it?

However, most of these scripts create graphic links, often in the form of buttons, and not text links. No big deal, but you can’t place them wherever you want. Let’s say you want to place a retweet text link right in the middle of your blog post content, or in your email or forum signature… Have you been wondering how to do this? Here is how to create a retweet text link in under a minute:

Let’s break this down into two parts. First, use the following link part:

http://twitter.com/home?status=

Then, add your tweet text after the equals sign. In the following example I use a message that I recently tweeted on my Twitter profile @ColinKlinkert.

http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @ColinKlinkert – Colin showing you how to create a retweet text link for Twitter http://vurl.bz/s/retweet

Now hyperlink the text in your content. Here is the end result:

Click here to retweet

Pretty easy, isn’t it? Now you can place retweet text links wherever you want, including your page content, email signature, forum signature… This is very useful if you want your visitors to take action at a given time when going through your content.

By the way, you know that Twitter only allows messages of 140 characters or less. Well, if you want to shorten your links, make sure you check my 7 reasons to cloak your links with ViralUrl!

James Holmes says:

March 17, 2010 at 6:38 am

Colin –

This is a very handy bit of tutoring! There are occasions when it would be nice to suggest a share or tweet and you correctly stated that the social bookmarking icons don’t really fit in the middle of a post or in a signature box. I will use this set of tips time and again. Thank you for the excellent info!

James

Make Money Online says:

March 17, 2010 at 1:07 pm

I had no idea that you could do that. I have been using retweet buttons and thought it would take knowing how to create script or some other form of code to create a text retweet link. This will be extremely helpful with my blogs thank you.

Kris,

Adegbenga Agoro says:

August 20, 2010 at 6:15 pm

Thanks so much for this tutorial, actually wanted to visitors to retweet a custom message and tweetMeMe just wasn’t giving me what I needed. This came like a breath of fresh air.

Thanks again