Since you’re reading this, you likely know about Twitter’s share button. Simply, you can click a button and share a website, such as this blog post, on Twitter. That button helps drives tons of traffic to sites, but has some limitations. The two biggest being: 1) it requires javascript, so you have to place it on a website and can’t use it in places like email and 2) it has a very specific design which isn’t customizable.

Thankfully, Twitter makes it easy to replicate this functionality using a link (click here for an example), which allows you to overcome these limitations with ease. Best of all, the entire share process and functionality is exactly the same as the Twitter provided button:

twitter share

Let’s break down the following URL: https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?related=drigotti&url=http%3A%2F%2Finfo.bizible.com%2Fmulti-touch-attribution-for-companies-with-sales-teams&text=Bizible+tracked+all+the+marketing+touches+for+nearly+500,000+leads

  • https://twitter.com/intent/tweet Base code to the sharing functionality
  • related=drigotti Suggest account(s) for the user to follow once they have sent a Tweet
  • url=http%3A%2F%2Finfo.bizible.com%2Fmulti-touch-attribution-for-companies-with-sales-teams The URL to share
  • text=Bizible+tracked+all+the+marketing+touches+for+nearly+500,000+leads The text the to share, with plus signs between each word

Use cases

Use case #1: Gibbon uses this approach to smartly make their emails shareable.

gibbon email

Use case #2: Make custom sharing buttons. In addition to using as a regular link, you can also stylize to make custom share buttons. For example, here’s what I use on my personal website.

custom share buttons

As you’ve probably figured out from the previous screenshots, this functionality is also offered by Facebook, Google, and even LinkedIn. By using these published APIs, you can have full customizable and consistent sharing across your site.

Getting advanced

While the standard link structure will likely be enough for most readers, here are a couple of ways to extend the functionality:

Pro tip #1: Use the SharedCount API to still show the number of shares.

Pro tip #2: Include a Javascript handler to open the share box in a popup window instead of opening a new browser tab.

Are you using Twitter’s tweet link? If so, how?