07 Jan 5 Ways TweetBacks Can Make Your Blog More Social — and More Viral

Posted at 18:04h in Social Media Tools by

The following is a guest post from Dan Zarrella @DanZarrella.com

A few days ago I released the first implementation of TweetBacks . The concept behind this is to port the idea of trackbacks to Twitter; that is, display a list of Tweets linking to your blog right underneath your post (either above or below your comments).

I believe that a Tweetback can be a powerful tool for a few reasons:

  1. Tweeting is an easier and faster method of commenting and sharing interesting content, so by allowing your readers to respond to your posts via Twitter, you’re lowering the bar and encouraging more feedback.
  2. Twitter also has a greater potential for conversation than traditional commenting does. All of a user’s followers will see, and can therefore respond to, each Tweet, whereas before only the people who saw your post were exposed. This has the effect of stimulating more and wider-reaching conversation.
  3. Leveraging Twitter is very powerful way to get more (targeted) traffic to your blog, and by displaying a list of TweetBacks about your post you are including an implicit call to action for your readers to go ahead and Tweet about your content.
  4. Social proof has consistently appeared in my research as an important factor in the infectiousness of content. When users see that other people have shared a link or idea, they are much more likely to do so themselves, creating a cascade of virality. TweetBacks add another layer of social proof to your posts, and in this way can help your blog spread to more people for a longer amount of time.
  5. My studies have shown that the majority of ReTweets contain a link, effectively making them TweetBacks. In the future I plan to integrate my JavaScript TweetBacks implementation with my ReTweet mapping system. That way, if you’re using my JS script, you’ll be able to track and analyze the spread of your content through Twitter in previously unheard of ways.