While browsing the web, have you ever come across a cool new site, web tool or article that made you say to yourself “man, my Twitter followers really need to know about this!”?
I know, “need to know” is rather relative. There are those out there who think the whole world needs to know when they’re eating a taco, sitting on the couch in their PJs, or, even scarier, DRIVING to work (wait until you’re stopped to tweet, PLEASE!). But I think we’ve all been there – is there an easier way to share links on Twitter?
The long way around is to highlight and copy the URL, go to your favorite URL shortening service, paste it in, grab the shortened URL, go to your favorite Twitter client (or Twitter directly) and paste the URL with a quote or phrase. For a veteran computer user, this process doesn’t take ALL that long, but the process CAN be automated and we ALL like that, don’t we?
Enter TBUZZ by our friends over at Arc90. TBUZZ is a little project of theirs that brings us a nifty little bookmarklet that makes tweeting a current web page VERY easy. Visit TBUZZ and drag the button to your bookmarks toolbar,
and click it when you’re visiting a site you want to tweet about. It is that easy, however the wonderfullness does not stop there. Here are three tricks that TBUZZ does that makes when you want to share links on Twitter SO much easier.
1) Shortening the URL is taken care of automatically.
Don’t want to take that extra step to make sure the URL is shortened? When you hit the bookmarklet to tweet the post, TBUZZ automatically hooks you up with a bit.ly link making it so that the website’s address doesn’t take up the whole 140 character tweet. Did I say, AUTOMATICALLY? There’s no copying the address, visiting the bit.ly site, pasting the address, and grabbing the shortened URL. It’s all done for you!
2) Quoting a portion of the site is taken care of easily.
When tweeting about a new link you’ve found, sharing what’s going on on the web, sharing just some shortened URL doesn’t help much, does it? No one’s interest would be peeked and if someone DOES wonder, who wants to click a link that they know nothing about what to expect? That’s no fun and I’m sure not safe.
The best thing to do is to give a blurb about the link, but, better yet, give a short quotation from the page. If you do both, you’re on your way to tweeting proficiency! Again, TBUZZ saves the day, and some much needed energy and time. All you have to do is highlight the portion you want to quote before clicking the bookmarklet, and you’re given a nifty popup with the shortened URL, the quotation in… you’ll never guess… quotation marks, AND the opportunity to add your own blurb! PERFECT!
3) Checking out what others are saying about the link is done for you automatically.
Last but not least, once you click the bookmarklet, you’re given a list of tweets from other people who have also found, liked, and tweeted about the same link. From here you can, instead of tweeting the link, respond to other tweets about the link. It’s also really neat seeing the already going on conversation about the link. What are others saying? How popular is this link? Do some of these people have some of the same interests as I do? Very cool.
There are many Twitter tools out there. TBUZZ is another quality contender I think you’ll have a hard time living without. However, if you have an easier way to share links on Twitter, we would love to hear about it in the comments.
Tagged: bookmarklets • link sharing • Twitter
