ClickToTweet is a really useful tool for your library's Twitter account

After an unscheduled delay, Twitter week on the Toolkit blog is finally here! Subscribe to get 5 posts  over the next 5 days about using Twitter productively in your library - starting with a nice little tool I found out about via Elyssa Kroski's OEDb blog called ClickToTweet. It's still in beta but it seems like a really simple, useful, progressive idea.

ClickToTweet: What is it?

You can find the site at clicktotweet.com and it allows you to make any sentence, link, or combination of the two, easily tweetable with a click. So in the same way you would offer a RT button on a blog post to easily enable you to tweet a link to that post, so you offer a button to tweet anything you want - for example, specific headlines, facts or statistics from a website or post.

How does it work?

You go to clicktotweet.com and type in the message you want people to tweet. It gives you a URL. You write the same message on your website or blog and write 'Tweet this' or whatever next to it, hyperlinked to the URL. Your users click the link, and the text is automatically in their Twitter send box, ready for them to click 'Tweet'.

Are you with me? So here's an example:

• I'm just trying out clicktotweet.com, after reading about it via this article on @LibMarketing:  http://bit.ly/RGPN7A | [tweet this]

Click the button, and you'll see how it works for the user. (You don't have to actually send the tweet if you don't want to!)

Step-by-step

So for that link above, I went to the site, and I generated the link like this:

Then I copied and pasted the URL it gave me, and used it to hyperlink [tweet this] above. Then when people click that link, they get my customised message, which'll look like this:

Good eh? NB: I used bit.ly to shorten the link - if you've got used to Twitter shortening links for you, you may be surprised to see your potential tweet exceeding the number of characters available, like I was! But bit.ly will sort that out.

How might we use it?

As always, the real question is not 'how good is the tool?' but 'can we use it to successfully engage our users?'

Here are some ideas:

• Adding it in lieu of a RT button where one isn't readily available (e.g. for tweeting a link to a LibGuides page on an academic library website)
• 'Take-homes' from an educational blogpost (e.g. "Signing out of Google when searching is one technique for avoiding the filter-bubble - via @yourlibrary")
• Top stats to tweet from a factual blog post (e.g. "Research shows that for the best response, emails should be sent between 2pm and 3pm - via @yourlibrary")
• Calls to action (e.g "I just enrolled on the Library's such-and-such course, at [insert link here]"
• Sharing events ("I'm going to the library's such-and-sucj - details here! [link]" 
• Basically any kind of headlines as they appear on a webpage or blogpost (e.g. you write 'Try Compfight or BlueMountains for finding high-quality Creative Commons images" and next to it put a 'tweet this' link - the actual tweet it self says "The YourLibrary website recommends Compfight or BlueMountains for high-quality CC images")  

I'm sure you can imagine much better ones - leave them in a comment if you'd like to share them. One last obvious tip: even if you're not including a link in the pre-prepared tweets, try and include your library's Twitter handle at least, so people know where all this amazing information is coming from when they read the tweets...

Here's one last link, to Tweet about this post!