For most blogs Twitter has never been the primary source of social traffic. It lags far behind Facebook and YouTube when it comes to social leads.

But, Twitter has another power over blog readers. A Twitter counter aside your post title can act as an authority trigger. The more tweets you have for a post, the higher the likelihood new visitors will read it.

Twitter uses a smart algorithm: it counts only one tweet from one profile. Tweeting a post many times from one and the same account doesn’t increase the counter.

Instead, you better try to increase the number of organic tweets on your articles.

People click the share button for different reasons:

• They love the article and want to recommend it to friends
  
• They just bookmark the post to read it later.
  
• The tweet raises their prestige as it touches upon their professional or social matters.

What You Can Do On-page

1. Revise Twitter Buttons

Make sure you have Twitter buttons (better with the counter) at least in one of the following places:

• After the headline
  
• At the end of the post
  
• On left sidebar.

There are a lot of plugins which allow webmasters to add similar buttons and sidebars. Just to name a few:

• Social Buttons with Floating Sidebar
  
• Ultimate Social Media Plus

Or visit Twitter’s section for developers and get Twitter’s button code.

2. Experiment With Popups

Popups are a great way to attract visitors’ attention. But first weigh all pros and cons. Popup overuse can irritate your visitors and make them leave.

You can use the following plugins to add a small pop message to asj users to share the post :

• Social PopUp
  
• WordPress Popup
  
• Twitter Like Box.

3. Work Out Your Titles

By default, a page’s <title> tag becomes the text for the tweet.

If you don’t use special code or Twitter Cards to specify custom text, be extra mindful of your titles. Are they also good for tweets? The best titles are the ones that state a benefit and generate curiosity.

Follow the best practices of composing social headlines.

4. Offer Bonuses For Tweeting

Perks are always great! Offer a bit more to your readers for a fast social sharing.

Examples:

• extra content about the topic
  
• free chapters of your video course or ebook
  
• a PDF copy of your article

In case you market a product, you may offer a free trial or extra features for tweeting, the way Dropbox does:

5. Ask To Thank You

Readers always appreciate your efforts to create useful and informative content. Why not ask something in return?

Make a small block on your site or a special page where you can describe the ways to thank you for the hard work you do for free.

See Freemake‘s example:

What You Can Do On Twitter

6. Ask To Retweet

Simply adding “Please retweet” or “Please RT” to the end of a tweet, increases retweets.

Each retweet is counted.

7. Post Images

Photos in Twitter’s stream have a magic power: they are capable of attracting more attention than regular text tweets.

Use bright pictures with or without text on them to illustrate your tweets. These shouldn’t always be the featured images from your blog posts. Funny pics and memes are also good!

8. Reach Out To Influencers

When you tweet a post, consider reaching out to Twitter influencers who also engaged with a similar post.

You can easily find such people using BuzzSumo. Just type a topic your post is about and choose the ones having the most shares.

You can send these influencers the following tweet:

Hi, I noticed you’re interested in [topic]. I just covered

9. Use Quoting And Hashtags

Hashtags are extremely popular on Twitter. By adding a couple of trending hashtags on topic to your tweets, you can significantly increase their reach.

The same holds true for @ mentioning people or companies. If you wrote a review of some product, mention its creators on Twitter. You can do this either within the text of your tweet or tag people on images you upload. Both options work well.

10. Follow People Interested In Similar Content

Use Twitter search to find top and recent tweets from your niche. Favorite or retweet several of their posts. The users will notice your activity and get interested in your profile. They will see that you share similar interests in content and so be more inclined to follow you and retweet your posts.

^{* Lead images adapted from mkhmarketing, MDGovpics, John Twohig Photography}