Top 3 Free Click to Tweet Plugins in 2018 and How to Add Click to Tweet Boxes Inside Your WordPress
This is a post about the top 3 free click to tweet plugins. Why only 3? Because who the hell needs more than 3 options to make a simple click to tweet box inside his WordPress website?
Recently I wanted to add a click to tweet box on my other site and of course, the first thing I did is to open another tab and type in Google “click to tweet plugin for WordPress.” I thought that this will be a fairly simple task and in a couple of minutes, I will have a nice tweet box inside my new post. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. I spend more than an hour installing and testing different click to tweet solutions. I didn’t like most of them. I had to go through probably all solutions invented so far till I found what I wanted.
Since there aren’t really good articles in the subject, and unfortunately not enough plugins allowing you to click a button and tweet part of your post, I decided to write my own blog post.
Here I will share the top 3 free click to tweet plugins available online today. Hopefully, you will find what you want by only reading this post and not having to read half of the internet.
Ok, let see what are these plugins and also see how we can add tweet boxes inside your WordPress.
But first…
What’s a Click to Tweet Box?
You’ve probably seen them before, little fancy boxes inside other sites that have a small click to tweet buttons that are irresistible to press.
I’ve added a click to tweet button inside my article about 10 practical SEO techniques. It looks like that:
You can see buttons like this one, and actually even better in sites like backlinko.com or neilstrauss.com. These are two of my favorite sites.
Why Add a Click to Tweet Button inside your WordPress Website?
Well, for an obvious reason, to engage people. These buttons are nice to have and actually work because they can put the focus on a specific sentence of your article and they’re doing the heavy lifting.
If you’re a website owner, you want more people to share your content. More shares mean more traffic. And we all know what more traffic means: more income.
Since we people are lazy, you as a website owner need to make sharing crazy easy and seamless. A person visiting your website will surely won’t copy the URL of your article, paste it inside his tweet box, add a title, paste the link and even add your twitter username. He must be crazy or a wide fan of your work, which also means that he’s crazy.
The idea of click to tweet buttons is to ease your visitors so that they can share your article without needing to do more than pressing a single button. So, consider adding such inside your posts. They will surely increase your share counts, thus the visits to your site.
After we covered the basics, let’s see what are the top 3 free click to tweet plugins for WordPress. Besides the actual names of the plugins, I will also show you how to install those.
1. Better Click To Tweet by Ben Meredith
Ok, let’s start with Better click to tweet plugin by Ben Meredith.
You can find the plugin inside the WordPress repository. Access your dashboard > Plugins > Add new > Search for Better Click To Tweet:
Install and activate the plugin.
Once the plugin is active you will see the following sales screen:
The author will list the benefits of upgrading to the paid plugin. To be honest, I don’t think you need to. Unless you don’t want to support the author of the plugin which is a humble gesture.
A new menu item will appear inside your admin called Better Click To Tweet, obviously:
Once you access the settings you will be able to add your Twitter username and also enable short links. This is good because if your URL is long it won’t take off your limited amount of symbols.
You can also click on to see what are the premium templates:
To be honest, the style of the free version is quite better.
Let’s see the plugin in action, go to a post of yours, copy a piece of text, click on the Tweet icon:
Paste the text inside this panel and save:
Go to your page and see what happened:
Nice, right?
You can test it out by clicking on the button:
You will see your text, the short link followed by your Twitter username.
2. Sumo Highlighter
Sumo Highlighter is part of the widely popular plugin SumoMe. This plugin offers extremely powerful options that will increase your social shares and also your email list.
In this post I won’t cover everything that this plugin can do, I’m only going to show you the feature where you allow visitors to share part of your post.
Keep in mind that this is not your regular click to tweet button. With Sumo Highlighter you can allow people to share any part of your page/post by simply highlighting part of the text. Even though it sounds absolutely amazing, there is one negative side to this. People won’t actually understand that they can do this. I don’t believe a lot of people highlight text while they read. If you’re planning to use this solution I will advise adding a simple text above your post, probably, where you can prompt your visitors to highlight the text so they can share it.
The same functionality is quite popular on the platform called Medium. I’m sure you’ve heard about this.
Ok, let me show you how this exactly works:
Go to Plugins > Add new and search for the following Sumo Highlighter. You will find the following plugin: Free Tools to Automate Your Site Growth. Activate the plugin:
A little blue notice will appear. Click it to setup your account:
Once you access your newly created account, you will see a setup wizard. You can skip it by pressing somewhere on the screen:
Go to Social > Highlighter:
A couple of settings here: Add your Twitter username and decide who can highlight text. I don’t think there is a good reason to leave this only for you. So, leave the radio button to the left:
Next, click on the design and change the pop-up box that will appear when a visitor wants to share something. It’s a good idea to make it contrasts with your site background:
URL shortener will compress your long links to tiny ones and this will save you space when you want to tweet something a bit longer. Set the preferences here and move to the next tab, Display Rules:
From this page, you can turn off the highlight feature to specific pages/posts. Nothing fancy here. Once you’re done save the changes to activate the plugin:
Ok, go to your post now so we can test the new feature.
Highlight a piece of content to see what will happen:
You get a box and an option to share the text via Facebook or Twitter. Super easy.
Cool. But there is something I don’t quite like about this plugin.
When you highlight a section and you share it, others will see the text appear highlighted and with a little start.
I mean, you will also see this but at least you will know why. In a way, it’s a good thing because people can now simply press on the obviously highlighted text and share the same passage, but on the other hand, your whole post can become randomly highlighted by the people visiting your website. Like on my test page below:
It’s surely something different and it’s probably worth trying, but I don’t believe I will add this to my own website.
One more thing about the SumoMe plugin, I kind of hate this little option panel appearing on my site. Your visitors will be seeing this as well unless you upgrade to the paid version.
3. Click to Tweet Button by Coschedule
I saved the best for last. Or did I.
The click to tweet plugin by Coschedule is super easy to use and it’s the best free tweet plugin I found online. You can visit their official site to see what I’m talking about and more precisely the page where you can download the plugin, here.
Once you’re on the page, download the plugin. Don’t worry. This is not a virus or something, I’ve tested it. Install the plugin by going to Plugins > Add new > Upload Plugin and activate it – I’m not going to show you how to do this. I’m sure you all know.
Once the plugin is active, go to the newly appeared menu inside Settings > Click to tweet:
Add your twitter username and save the changes.
Now, go to a new post. Copy a sentence you want to make tweetable and press the little tweet icon inside your panel:
Paste the sentence and click OK:
Go to your article to see what happened:
Nice and clean text. Press the button to see what will happen:
Once the screen loads, you will see your sentence added inside a tweet box. Alongside the sentence there is also a link to the article and your tweeter username is included. The person only needs to click the tweet and you have +1 share.
Unfortunately, this plugin has one downside, it’s not been tested with the current version of WordPress and the last update of the plugin was 4 years ago 🙁
Use this plugin on your at your own risk.
Top 3 Free Click to Tweet Plugins Comparison
Ok, let’s make a quick comparison between the 3 plugins:
I will access the same post I used for my examples above and I will copy the same line two more times so I will have 3 in total:
Next, I will make click to tweet boxes for the first and third texts and I will leave the second one to be highlighted with the Sumo plugin. So, just to avoid any confusion:
- Text 1 is using Better click to tweet plugin by Ben Meredith.
- Text 2 is with Sumo Highlighter
- Text 3 is with Click to Tweet Button by Coschedule
Here how they look on the page:
Obviously, Sumo Highlighter is different from the other two but there is not much of a difference between 1 and 3.
FINAL THOUGHTS
What do you think? Which plugin do you think is the best one for creating click to tweet texts on your WordPress website?
If you ask me, I will go with option number 1: Better click to tweet plugin by Ben Meredith.
The plugin is regularly updated, the tweet box looks nice and it’s super easy to be installed. As for Sumo Sumo Highlighter – It’s definitely a different solution and you might test it on your website and see what will be the results but I believe Better click to tweet plugin wins the battle and deserves first place in the top 3 free click to tweet plugins.
What about you? What are you using on your WordPress website?