As you may know, one of the social networking tools I use quite often is Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging platform that lets you share ideas, links, blog posts and converse with other twitter users in real time.

Twitter stores posts chronologically from all the people you follow so you can keep up with what they are doing throughout the day or night.

If I am online, you can bet I have twitter open in a separate window and refresh my stream often. It’s one of the ways I get news and information from like minded people and it’s an exellent way to socialize and meet new people. A couple weeks ago I listed my twitter feed on a forum post at Entrecard and since then my followers have increased 50% to nearly 200 followers.

Today I discovered another way to get more exposure through twitter and again through social networking. If you run your blog using WordPress you can add a simple line of code that will alert your readers they can tweet your post. Adding this functionality can increase your overall traffic which in turn has the potential to drive more earnings your way.

How is this accomplished? I have to give credit to JohnChow for the original code (to which he gives credit elsewhere) and it should be noted that I had to modify John’s original code to make it work for my blog. Thanks for the tip John! One of the reasons is that my installation of wordpress prefers dynamic linkage wherever possible and doesn’t always render HTML links properly. The following code works for this blog:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=Reading @Flagusco – <?php the_title(); ?> <?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?>?p=<?php the_ID(); ?>”><img src=”/blog/images/tweet-this-small.png” border=”0″ alt=”Tweet This!” align=”absmiddle” />Tweet This Post!</a>

Notice the php code I have used compared to what John posted. The reason why is because I can copy and paste this code to any blog using WordPress and the only things I have to change are the URL to the images folder for the little bird and the @name for the proper twitter account I want to reference (of course I only have the one).

Now when you read an article you find interesting you can let your Twitter followers know about it. You can say a little bird told you. There are plugins that do this but then you have to constantly update the plugin when something changes. This code is optimized for any wordpress blog.

Find out what I am doing right now by following me on Twitter! If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS. You can also subscribe by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.

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