I was thinking about this for quite some time now — an actual retweet button for WordPress, and I wonder why Twitter hasn’t provided one yet, it’s so obvious!
Yes, the tweet button is doing a great job these days, but let’s admit, that we content publishers enjoy retweets more than regular tweets to our articles, because:
- They show your name and your Twitter avatar along with the original message, so when others see your tweet retweeted, there’s a better chance they’ll follow you.
- They instantly show up in your Interactions and increase the retweet count, so you can always see who’s tweeting your posts, without having to use Twitter’s search.
- They give you a better chance to get a Top Tweet, thus providing even more exposure.
With the use of Twitter’s Web Intents I was able to create a small extension for Sharedaddy (bundled with Jetpack.) It allows the use of a retweet button as one of the sharing options.
It currently fetches the post meta for a retweet-id key which has to be the id number of the original tweet on Twitter. You can use the Custom Fields interface to enter the retweet-id value, but will probably wrap this up in a meta box, where one could just give the URL of the tweet.
As soon as there’s a retweet ID associated with a post or page, the retweet button will show up, and when clicked, it will popup a web intent with the option to retweet.
However, if a retweet ID has not been supplied, the retweet button will fall back to the original tweet button shipped with Sharedaddy, so make sure you don’t use the two together :)
Download
The plugin is still very rough and I thought I’d give it a test drive here on my blog, before sending it out to the public plugins directory. Obviously there probably are some bugs, cross-browser issues and css overhead. You can follow the plugin project on Github and make sure you have activated Jetpack or Sharedaddy before using the plugin.
Thanks for stopping by, and feel free to share your thoughts and comments. Let me know if you’d like to contribute to the plugin, so I can give you push access on Github. I appreciate retweets too!
