Finally! Twitter woke up and realized that a two-step process for following your favorite blogger was one step too many.
Before today, you had to link to your Twitter.com page and hope your reader followed you from there. The horrible part was that you risked losing your reader when they were distracted by seeing their BFF in their Twitter stream.
With the new Twitter Follow Button, your readers can simply click the Follow Button and keep reading your blog. You can also choose to add your follower count for a social proof bump. Nice.
The new process opens up more opportunities for you to increase your Twitter followers by sprinkling the Follow Button strategically throughout your site.
Here’s 7 Nifty Places for Your Follow Button
- Top or Bottom of Posts: Get the party started by inviting your readers to follow you with one click.
- Sidebar: I spent an entire month trying to figure out how to make it easy to add follower numbers along with the Follow Button. Geez, I just had to wait a week longer to get an easy piece of code to put in my sidebar.
- E-mail Newsletter Confirmation Pages: New e-mail subscribers are a great source for new followers. Just place your new Follow Button on the “confirmation” page after they verify their e-mail subscription.
- E-mail Newsletter Template: I haven’t tested this yet, but consider including your Follow Button in your e-mail newsletter in the sidebar or just below your post titles.
- First-Time Commenters: I use a nifty plugin that redirects new commenters to a Thank You screen. Right, you guessed it. This is an awesome place to squeeze in a Follow Button.
- Product Landing Pages: Now that you won’t be shipping your readers to Twitter with every follow link, you can put the Follow Button on your landing pages. This is a great way to grow your audience while promoting your services.
- About Me and Author Bios: Make sure that curious readers get the opportunity to follow you directly from your About Me page. This is a natural fit for your new Follow Button.
Some Things to Watch Out For
It looks like the new button doesn’t work on secure pages. This means that putting the Follow Button on pages hidden behind a login is a non-starter for now. As with any shiny new tool, it’s also easy to get carried away. So don’t turn your blog into a “Follow Me” carnival. Strategically and tastefully consider where you want to get new followers.
Let me know how you plan to use the new Twitter Follow Button on your blog. Tell me what you think in the comments section below.
About Stanford
Hi Stanford,
Nice collection of ways to get more followers.
I put the twitter follow button but I think that the font-size is too small: 11px
Would be nice to have some options of customization.
Nice article until pop up domination interupted me! If you think that’s good for your business or for your reputation…to deliberately wait till i’m 25 seconds into reading your article and then interupt me with some rubbish list building technique, well you have been looking at the wrong stats! It stinks of sneakiness and dodgy internet marketing. I don’t care if 80% do it, it’s wrong! It does nothing to get any kind of relationship off on the right foot!
It’s time people stopped putting up with this crap. I’m in interent marketing and sure i’ve seen much worse that this but it is so deliberate in what it does it makes my blood boil.
Thanks, looked like a good article until that, i’m out bye!
Bye Josh.
Thank the Twitter gods! They have heard our prayers! I think its extremely important to be able to keep your reader without having to open up Twitter. I always found that very distracting when I wanted to follow a blogger or writer. These are some great and practical tips on places to insert the follow button. Thanks so much for them!
I was thinking to put it on my sidebar to replace the current one that just goes to the Twitter page. But I know some people would rather just go to see your tweets first before committing to follow you. I wonder if the average user will like it more or less to be able to follow someone immediately vs. getting to check them out first.
I have a twitter widget in my sidebar that shows my latest tweets. That way people can see my tweets on my site. Do you have the same set-up?
Thanks for sharing. Just added.
Hi Standford,
At first, I didn’t think much about this. I thought it was too much hype. But now that I think about it, it is pretty efficient to be able to keep a reader on your site without sending them off to Twitter so I certainly see how it’s effective.
As for the placement tips you suggested, I’m in agreement with just about all of them, well done!
Way too much coding to do – I would love to know how to do it, but I just don’t have the time to invest in learning that right now.
Graham, they give you a snippet of code that you can put directly into a sidebar widget. Not too hard – but the really good tactics take a little work
I might do a video on how to use the Follow Button code if I see enough interest.