In this video, we’re going to add the TweetMeme widget to our WordPress blog.
[evp width=”640″ height=”480″]tutorials/wpvideos/tweetmeme-wp.swf[/evp]
So this widget, or this WordPress plugin, is already listed on WordPress.org, what you need to do is just type in TweetMeme, T-W…okay, and click on Search Plugins.
And you can see the TweetMeme button here, but also make sure that this is the actual official plugin released by TweetMeme themselves; and then you can just click on Install…make sure it’s compatible to your version of WordPress, and then click on Install Now.
Okay, so once the TweetMeme button has been installed to your WordPress blog, you can just activate the plugin.
Once plugin has been activated, in your left section here, your navigation section here, you’ll be able to see a new TweetMeme button, and if you click on the small button here, you can actually expand this entire menu; alright, so, first thing you want to do is click on Settings…and in the main Settings page, first you want to determine where you want to display the TweetMeme button. So you can display the button on pages, or not, if you choose; you can also display the button on the front page home, and display the image button in your feed only available at your normal size widget. So basically, TweetMeme button embeds the TweetMeme function onto single post pages, your front page, and also in your RSS feed. So you can disable all the three out of four options, but by default, it will be embedded in your individual blog post.
Next, you can choose the position that you want the button itself to appear, either before the content, or after the content…and also in your RSS feed, you can choose to have it appear before the content, after the content, both before and after, or to manually insert it, in which case you would need to put in the Shortcode ‘[tweetmeme]’.
If you’re good at CSS and you want to modify the CSS style, you can just edit the default CSS style over here. For example, if you want the button to float to the left of your content instead of the right by default, then you can just change this value to ‘left’. Okay? Next, choose to display the normal-size widget or the compact widget. Now, I’ll show you the differences between these two widgets later.
And finally in source, now when a user clicks on the retweet button, you’d want to also include your Twitter username in the retweets, so put in your Twitter user name. For example, if your Twitter account name is actual name, then I’m just going to put ‘actualname’ here. And there are a few other settings that you don’t need to mess around with, you can just leave it as a default, but I’ll just go through them just in case.
Now, any post to Twitter is going to use some kind of URL shortener, okay? So you can either leave it as default or you can choose bit.ly, awe.sm, cligs, is.gd, TinyURL, Ow.ly, or retwt.me. Okay? So, one of the popular services is of course bit.ly, and if you have a bit.ly account then you should have an API key that you should enter over here.
Next, you can also choose to list a certain amount of space, or blank space, or white space, at the end of each tweet. Again, if you don’t really understand the function of this, you can just leave it as it is, and if you have a particular hashtag, you can also include the hashtag into your retweets as well.
And finally, you can choose to alert TweetMeme whenever a new post is published. Okay, so there are two ways of operating this TweetMeme button – number one is to post it to Twitter and also to list it on the TweetMeme.com website itself. This is by default, so if you only want to post Twitter but you do not want to list it at TweetMeme.com, for whatever reason, then you can just select No. But of course, we all want as much traffic as we can get, so we can leave it as Yes and click on Save Changes.
Okay, so now, let’s take a look at the actual blog post itself. This is the blog post before I installed the TweetMeme button, so I’m just going to refresh this, and now you can see the TweetMeme button appears over here. Okay? At the moment, there are zero tweets or retweets on this particular blog post. So what happens when a user visits your website is that they are going to click on this button over here, and it says, ‘Tweet this’. And then we’ll open up the TweetMeme window, and the actual tweet message is here. So, if you analyze this message, RT stands for ‘retweet’ and this is your Twitter username, this is the blog post title, and this is the short URL to the actual blog post itself. So that’s how it works when someone clicks on the TweetMeme button.
Now let’s take a look at the compact widget. Okay, so I’m going to change the type to ‘The compact widget’, and click on Save Changes. Now let’s refresh this blog post…and you can see the compact widget over here. The compact widget basically just lists the number of times it has been retweeted and also then, just the button to retweet.
So that’s how easy it is to start using TweetMeme and also to display the TweetMeme button in your WordPress blog.