This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti, a contributing Buffer Blog columnist. More about him at the bottom of the post.
I’ve already covered 4 unique Twitter tips on utilize your blogging strategies totweet better… but how can you get people tweeting about your content?
Twitter remains to this day one of the biggest drivers of website (and blog) traffic on the web, so enticing people to tweet about your content will have a serious impact on your visibility.
It can also be what gets the ball rolling for your content to go viral on Twitter.
Best of all: all 3 of these methods are ridiculously easy to implement (seriously, you’ll wonder why you’ve never tried them before).
1.) Give Away A Cool Freebie… For A Tweet
One of the absolute best ways that I’ve seen people get more retweets for their content is by offering their readers something free in exchange for a very small “payment”… in the form of a tweet.
The classic use: give away a free e-Book in exchange for a tweet.
I’ve also seen full software, videos, and every sort of digital product in between given away for a tweet, so anything that you can “ship” over the web is prime for this strategy.
But how well does it actually work?
Your results will of course depend on your traffic, but for any blog with a few thousand subscribers, and the right incentive, you could be looking at some huge numbers.
As an example, over on Passive Panda, a free collection of 50 e-Books was publicized in one post, but before you could gain access to them, a tweet (or a Facebook share) was required.
Sounds easy enough for both the blogger and the tweeter right?
Everybody wins.
So how did it do?
Not bad.
Not bad at all.
The best part is that can literally work for any industry, because it is much more accessible (and tech friendly) than telling someone your autoresponder will email them a freebie (I use this on my electronic music blog to give out free music, it works like crazy!)
It has the added benefit of being a loop that is headed towards becoming viral, with enough initial traffic.
What do I mean?
The thing is, with the tweet that your readers send out for the free gift, a link is added to the end that goes back to the post they tweeted from.
If people click through, they land on the page asking them to tweet for a free gift, and the process begins anew.
So what tools will let you do this?
Luckily, not only are there two great tools for this very strategy, both of them are free.
My personal favorite is Cloud:Flood, which is being used in the screenshots above.
The process is really simple to follow too:
1.) Name your freebie + add a link to it (hosted, or another page on your site)
2.) Put the message that will be shared (ie: “Check out this great gift Greg is giving away on Sparring Mind!”)
3.) Add the URL that people sharing will link to (preferably the URL where they can grab the freebie too, so the cycle can continue as mentioned above)
In case you want another option, I got you covered 
.
The highly popular Pay With A Tweet service is also quite useful (if not as aesthetically pleasing) and does the same thing as Cloud:Flood.
Pay With A Tweet has now been used over 400,000 times by bloggers all over the web, making it one of the newest blogging tools that has really made a huge impact in the social media and blogging scene recently.
How will you utilize these tools are your next giveaway?
Get 200% more clicks
on your Tweets
By Buffering Tweets, they are posted at optimal times giving you 2x more exposure.
2.) Allow People To Tweet ANYTHING On The Page
Strange title, dead simple strategy.
What if, whenever you featured a cool quote, image, idea, literally anything on your blog, you could let readers tweet about only that one thing?
Could be kind of cool right?
People might be more inclined to tweet a quote that you added to a post, rather than the full post itself (humans can have short attention spans, and you have to cater to that sometimes ).
Enter Click To Tweet, the tool that allows you to do just that.
Now, any element on your website or blog can be tweeted about by adding a custom link that you set up how you want.
Above is Click To Tweet in action (the hyperlink, “Tweet This Quote”).
By clicking that link, you will tweet out the quote that the blogger (Hiten Shah) has added to Click To Tweet, along with a link back to his blog.
People love sharing simple things like images and quotes, and you can make it easy for them to share exactly what they want, and in return you get a link back to your blog in the tweet (or a mention if you choose to do so).
For instance, here is a quote that I really enjoy:
“Don’t speak unless you can improve the silence.”
{Tweet This Quote} <– And here is a simple link to share it.
You could let people share links to individual images, passages of your post, or other more “bit sized” pieces of content, trying to get a share out of people who might not share an entire blog post.
Success with this tactic relies exclusively on your own creativity, so…
How will you use this strategy to get more tweets?
3.) Pre-Made Tweets At The End of Blog Posts
If you are into blogging or content creation at all, you need to know this universally true fact: your readers are most primed for action after reading an entire piece of your content.
What that means is people are most likely to take action after they’ve read an entire post.
Think about it, if they can make it to the bottom, that means they’ve probably been really engaged in what they were reading, right?
So the “after-post” slot is one of the most critical in your site’s layout.
If more tweets is what you are after, putting something in this location is guaranteed to get more interaction than something at the top of the post (you have to make it easy for people, don’t make them scroll back up to tweet).
Better yet, what if you could have the tweet already displayed for them, requiring only a single click to send it out?
It’s possible, and it works really well.
Above is the tool in action, which I first discovered on Benny Hsu’s blog.
If you want to try it yourself (and you’re a WordPress user), you can install the incredibly awesome and incredibly free Twitter @Anywhere Plus plugin from the official WordPress site.
The main thing here is that you are eliminating any semblance of “work” for your online readers: not only is it in the prime location (after a full post), but it’s also set up to be inviting, as readers can see exactly what the tweet will look like before it goes out.
I’ve discussed the importance of social media focus and the dangers making things too complicated before, and the lesson is this: you need to think about user experience on your site more than anything.
Your site is more than just good reading, it really is an experience for your readers, and you need to treat it as such.
Want more tweets after long, engaging posts?
Optimize the location (bottom of the post) and above all… make it easy to do!
Twitter icon by Kamil Khadeyev.
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About the Author: Gregory Ciotti is the content strategist for Help Scout, the invisible email support software for startups and small
business owners.
Find out why Help Scout is the best affordable help desk system or get more content from Greg by downloading one of our free customer service resources.
