Is your content optimized for Twitter sharing?

We share a lot of content every week at WP Engine. Part of how we connect with new customers, and strengthen connections with old ones is by being a source for quality content on our social media profiles. One of my favorite tools to share content is called Buffer, and it is a simple tool that allows you to share blog posts on your preferred social networks.

Buffer is basically one of the best time-saving hacks for effective content marketing. Just add the browser extension, find awesome content, click the button, choose the social network you want to share on, and go. 

Ok, so assume people are coming by your site on a regular basis, and they want to be able to share your content via their Buffer. They also want to be able to attribute the post to your Twitter profile.

How Buffer works

You’ll notice that Buffer auto-populates the <title> tag of blog posts into the share box. So, that’s pretty legit, because it means that when you’re sharing content, you don’t have to spend those extra 20-30 seconds re-typing the title of the post. If you’re batch-scheduling content for a week or two, shaving 20-30 seconds off of a repetitive action is significant.

By default, WordPress inserts your site name into the <title> tag, but that’s sub-optimal, because it means that people either have to memorize your Twitter handle (not happening), or they’ll hunt on your site for it (unlikely), or just not attribute the article to your Twitter handle.

So let’s fix that. Let’s add your Twitter handle to the <title> of every blog post in your WordPress site.

Change the <title> tag in your SEO plugin

Mosey your bad self over to your SEO Plugin (you do have an SEO plugin, right?). You’re looking for the “Post Title Format” field. This is what we’re going to edit. It should be under a header like “Title Settings” or “Post Types.”

The “Post Title Format” field will already be filled out with the following “%%post_title%%  %%sitename%%” where “%%post_title%%” refers to the title of your post, and %%sitename%% refers to the Site Title in the General Settings tab.

Replace %%sitename%% with “by @yourtwitterhandle.”

You’re almost done. There’s a checkbox to force the SEO plugin to re-write the post titles with your Twitter handle. On All In One SEO Pack, the checkbox is called “Rewrite Titles” and Yoast calls it “Force rewrite.”

Once you’ve added your Twitter handle and forced the rewrite, save the changes. Now, when you switch over to a post on your site, you’ll see the changes reflected if you Buffer the post. Or you can view the source of the page, look for the <title> tag, which will now include “by @yourtwitterhandle” instead of your site name.

It’s a subtle change to your site, but it’s an important way to have a unified content marketing strategy.