Suimple

I often lack the motivation to tweet about events during my everyday Web browsing. The motivation to tweet is often less than the friction created by penning the 140 characters or less. Pathetic right? I don’t think I am alone in this, as designers how do we overcome this fiction? Fortunately there is a quick solution, write the Tweet for them.

I was recently contacted by my friends over at GreenLoop to do some Social Marketing Optimization (SMO) on a contest they are running to identify Americas next top Green Model. Specifically they were looking to up their chatter on twitter. They had created a twitter account and started a twitter hashtag for the contest #projectgreensearch. Traffic was building at the site however twitter follow growth and hashtag chatter we almost non existent.

Feeling lazy? Watch the Screencast.

Looking at the site the problem was obvious, no one was tweeting because they hadn’t asked them to. They had the obligatory twitter icon but there was no call to action. Problem solved right, create the call to action and we are done, instant twitter chatter. Wrong.

tweet action placed in proxity to primary call to action

The Call to action set up the event but the friction remained. Luckily twitter provides a simple solution for pre-filling your status. Simply add /home?status=”whatever+you+want+them+to+tweet” to your twitter link and when clicked the users twitter status will be pre-filled with your crafted message.

pre-filled tweet

This solution not only overcomes the friction of having to create the message it also allows you to control the messaging. Now you can be sure your #hashtags and @account are mentioned in the tweet.

The result for Projectgreensearch.com was a 1,700% increase in twitter referrals and a healthy bit of hashtag chatter.

Below is an example of how I implemented this functionaoity in WordPress. (single.php)

<?php 
  $tweettitle = $post->post_title;
  $tweetlink = $post->guid;
  $tweeetstatus = urlencode( "I voted for " . $tweettitle . " @ProjectGreen09 ". $tweetlink . " #projectgreensearch" );  
?>
<div id="tweetmyvote">
  <a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=<?php echo $tweeetstatus ?>" target="_blank">Tweet my vote!</a>
</div>

If your interested in doing some Social Media Optimization let me know