WHY?

Ah there’s a smell of dollars in the air. Businesses are drooling. In my mind I can see CEO saliva oozing under closed boardroom doors.

Yes, I think this one-click twitter button is a clear nod towards (big) business. It’s gonna do good for the rest of us too; bloggers, marketers, and anyone with a site, listen up.

OK, so what’s the big deal anyway? Any site owner with at least half a brain has already put a “follow me” twitter button on the page (like I have here on the right –>>>).

So far so good. The thing is though, these buttons take the visitor off your site, on to Twitter.com. And, chances are, they’re won’t be coming back. Maybe I’ll do a lecture on short attention spans and how to cater for them some other time. For now just trust me, many are not coming back. On top of that they have to click one more time on twitter.com to complete the “follow”. Which they may or may not do. Maybe they won’t like your profile picture. Maybe won’t like your followers. Maybe, and most probably they’ll just get sidetracked, like a 4 year old in a candy shop. Heck, if there was a way to track it I’m sure there’d be a huge percentage of people who click on the button, leave your site, and neither complete the follow nor come back. A complete waste of a good visitor. Sad, sad.

At least that’s how it was until now. Twitter has just graciously provided us with a more elegant alternative. Now the visitor can click and follow with just ONE CLICK. Tremendous because
1. there’s no chance of losing him/her before the second click,
2. he’s not taken off your site! Yay! No more lost-in-the-twitter-black-hole visitors!
Thank you twitter.com, you should have done this a long time ago!

HOW TO?

Go here;

http://twitter.com/about/resources/followbutton

Set the self-evident options;

Grab the code…

Code For The One-Click Goodness

…and whack it on your site.

Mind you, it’s a fairly small button, like this:

(gee I need a magnifying glass)

There is no control of size, colour or layout.
It doesn’t attract much attention, so it’s better used as a call of action inside a blog post, than a design element on the main page. Which is exactly how I’ve set it up. You’ll see it on my blog here, just under the title of each individual blog post. (Click on the title of the post if you don’t see it; it doesn’t display on the main page.)

How to set it up to display inside a blog posts, including yet unwritten new ones? I can show you how to do this for a wordpress.org blog like this one. Adding it to your theme’s “single.php” file in your wordpress theme should do it. However that’s not very elegant because you’ll have to re-do it if you change or update your theme. Plus it and requires some fairly rad ninja coding skills.

What’s a blogger to do then? Get a plugin to do it, of course. Just like in the Firefox browser, there is a plugin for anything and everything in wordpress.org. I used the Smart Ads, which is normally used to place ads inside your posts and spam your readers to oblivion. Who says the content has to be ads though? You can easily make it display anything you want on the top or bottom of each post. Easy as one-two-three.

Install the plug-in, then click on “Smart Ads” under “Settings” (small arrow).

Then scroll down the page, and copy the code from twitter.com above to one of the boxes (big arrows). Top box for top of the post placement, and the one below for bottom placement. (Bottom box is for “custom” placement. It’s a pain so leave it alone.) Click “Update” and you’re done.
That’s it, your blog is up to the latest Twitter tech now. If your blog is any good you’ll get more Twitter followers and less “lost in cyberspace” visitors. Enjoy.