Making Viral Retweet Links in Twitter

In this post we are going to describe (and show... video at bottom) how to create a viral link in your tweet that, when clicked on, is self replicating. The tinyurl link in your tweet will repopulate the clicker’s twitter status update box with the message of your choosing.



What’s in it for me?

Good question.  What this does is remove a step in the retweeting process for the end user, provided they are still using the basic web twitter interface... www.tweetdeck.com and www.hootsuite.com are much better twitter clients.

Step by Step Rundown

Okay first you are going to need a catchy message, this is a no brainer. For the purposes of this post and too be cheaky we have decided to use this message: “RT this because it is viral and will RT itself when you click this link: http://budurl.com/viralRetweet via @alterimaging.”

Now that you have your eye popping marketing message its time to get pseudo technical. Don’t worry, it’s really not that bad.

To make this link work you are going to have to put your message in the twitter url encoding syntax. Each word after the = sign must be separated by %20 which denotes a SPACE.

http://twitter.com/home?status= “Your message here” becomes:

http://twitter.com/home?status=RT%20this%20because%20it%20is%20viral%20and%20will% 20RT%20itself%20when%20you%20click%20this%20link:%20 http://budurl.com/viralRetweet%20via%20@alterimaging

Next Step

Go to your favorite URL shortener service that allows for custom aliases www.budurl.com/"whateveryourwantthelinktobe"

Budurl is one of my favorites due to the web analytic metrics you get back.

1. Name your link something custom.
2. Put that custom url into the long url you have created. It is your viral link
3. Paste in your long url with your message
4. Make sure you make this a 307 redirect as you might want to use the same custom name on a later date.



If you can’t read or choose not to we have the whole process shown in the video below. Enjoy and please feel free to comment & give feedback on this post.

How to make viral retweet links in Twitter from Alter Imaging, Inc. on Vimeo.