Tweet This - A Creatively Social Addition to your Marketing

It's very easy to make it quick and simple for your marketing audience to share things that they find interesting on Twitter, which exposes those marketing assets to a new audience. Although services like Twitter make sharing things discovered online quite simple to start with, we found that by making it even easier, we saw a lot more Tweets from people who found the content interesting enough to share with their friends and colleagues.

In a recent marketing campaign we were sharing a whitepaper called "The Springboard Effect" that talks about 5 strategies to help you emerge stronger after the recession (http://success.eloqua.com/ if you're interested), Eloqua's own marketing team used this approach with great success.

On the Hypersite landing page for the whitepaper, there was a simple one line question - "Have a Twitter account? Tweet about this whitepaper!". That was linked to the following URL (note that replacing spaces with the + sign can make things work much smoother):

"http://twitter.com/home?status=I+just+got+a+whitepaper+from+Eloqua+with+marketing+strategies+that+help+you+emerge+stronger+after+a+recession.+Get+it+-+http://bit.ly/P66Zy"

This link puts the person into Twitter, and pre-populates their Tweet with a quick comment on the whitepaper, and a URL that has already been shortened to make it fit into 140 characters. You can change the "status=" field to talk about your marketing asset in a way that would be appropriate for someone who found it interesting to share it on Twitter.

This is a simple technique to add to any marketing asset that might be something that your audience is interested in sharing. By simplifying the process to one click, and by reminding the audience to think about Tweeting, you can quickly see interesting content making its way to a larger audience than you first engaged with.

One thing to think about when doing this, is that you also have an opportunity to add a lead source code to the link that is shortened. For example if http://bit.ly/P66Zy leads users to http://success.eloqua.com/?elqPURLPage=2220&sc=TweetThisLink235 rather than just http://success.eloqua.com/?elqPURLPage=2220 you can easily track the effectiveness of this effort.

Of course this post would not be complete without a link to Tweet about this post.