image source: twitter.com
One of the great things about the WordPress platform for blogging is the sharing facility. These little buttons at the bottom of each post allow people who have liked what you’ve written to share it across many different social media platforms.
Like many other bloggers I use twitter. Twitter is fantastic a platform on which to share you content, but I’ve noticed recently that a a number of bloggers I follow are missing a great way of expanding their online community by not linking their blog to their twitter account.
Why is this important?
Whenever anybody shares one of your posts by twitter using the share button, your blog generates an automated tweet structured like this:
Blog title – blog post url – linked twitter name
Below is the text generated for my last post:
The difference between creativity and inspiration http://wp.me/p3Dds0-fH via @hearndylan
If you notice, I’ve already linked my twitter username, @hearndylan, to my blog. This means whenever anybody shares one of my posts, I get a notification from twitter letting me know what has been shared and by whom.
This is incredibly valuable information.
Think about it for a moment. This person has not only read your post, they liked it so much they wanted to share it with all their twitter followers. And if they enjoyed your post, there is every chance their like-minded followers will also enjoy the post and share it to their followers, and so on. Every time this share is retweeted, your twitter username is tweeted with it, meaning you get to see each and every person who enjoyed your post. How cool is that?
But what should you do with this information? The most effective twitter users know that engagement is key to building a strong following. This is where the true value of linking you username comes in. If the person who retweeted your post likes your writing so much, wouldn’t they be a great person to get to know better? The very least you can do is thank them for sharing your post. You could ask them what they most liked about it, you could follow them (if you don’t already), respond to some of their tweets in return. From these small interactions, friendships blossom. I’ve lost count of the number of great twitter friends I’ve met this way.
But, if you haven’t linked your blog to your twitter account, all this information is sent to @wordpressdotcom, and is lost to you forever.
So how do you change your settings?
The good news is this setting is very easy to change. Simply go to your Dashboard – Settings – Sharing. Fifth from bottom you will see an option snappily titled “Twitter username to include in tweets when people share using the Twitter button”. Replace ‘wordpressdotcom’ with your own twitter username (without the @), then press save.
Suffolk Scribblings 
Thanks Dylan ~ nice tip and already actioned 🙂
My pleasure, Paul 🙂
I want to add, if for whatever reason you change that Twitter username in the sharing settings later (say you’ve changed your Twitter handle or you want the blog to link to a different Twitter account), it doesn’t always “take” when people click the sharing buttons. If that happens, just post in the support forums and WordPress.com staff can fix it for you.
This is a great point! Thanks so much for sharing it with us 🙂
I’m still not on Twitter but thanks Dylan for this great tip for the future if and when I do decide to use it 🙂
You’re more than welcome, Sherri 🙂
My pist, sorry post titles — while often attempting to be witty, mellifluous or alliterative — don’t always make it obvious what the post is about, so I often expand on it in a second tweet later, using the same Twitter button. A useful facility, certainly!
That’s another great tip, Chris. The challenge, as always, is how to grab somebody’s attention in 140 characters (including blog title, url and your username). It’s not easy 🙂
Great tip. Thank you.
My pleasure, Gwen 🙂
And I was surprised to find that I’d already done this. Don’t recall setting it up — ha!
Great info for those not aware. If I share a post and see it’s not linked to the blogger, I go to Twitter and find their user name then add it to the share tweet and delete the WordPress one. If I can find their user name, that is.
It was doing this very thing that sparked the idea for this post. I think many bloggers who blog first and later move to twitter, miss this simple step (I did initially too).
I went and check and I had this set up correctly, but now that you mention it I’ve seen plenty that say @wordpress.
And the more you are aware of it, the more you see. Glad everything is OK for you. Thanks for dropping by 🙂
Very useful
Thank you 🙂
(apologies for the late reply, for some reason your comment got sent to spam).
Totally understandable.
Reblogged this on theowlladyblog.
Thanks for sharing this tip, Dylan! I checked and I have it set up. As I continue to blog, I keep finding settings that I don’t know about. 🙂