Better Click to Tweet: Basic and advanced usage guide

When you write a great post on your WordPress blog, it is clear that you would like it to have a lot of impact, to be widely read, shared, spread, right?

With this goal, in addition to our best possible content, we try to create a headline that gets as many clicks as possible in the SERP, and if possible, also that captures attention, that incites users of social networks to visit our website and read what we have written.

But this is not always possible. The “languages” in which we communicate with the search engine user and the social network user are very different.

The search engine user wants an answer to their concern, question or need, and will click on the headline that most seems to answer their question.

On the other hand, the social network user might be looking for videos of cute cats, but may visit a link if the headline is attractive, interesting, intriguing.

What you must be clear about is that a single headline will not necessarily be valid at the same time for both search engines and social networks, in fact it almost never will be.

So what do I do, is there a method to have different headlines depending on the destination of an entry?

How to provide different headlines for Twitter, different from the post title

A great way to achieve this, to offer alternative headlines, more suitable for social networks, in this case Twitter, is to create them and offer them in a way that makes them easy to share.

And for that there’s nothing quite like the Better Click to Tweet plugin.

What this plugin offers us is a simple way to insert in our content “other headlines“, which may be more effective on Twitter than the title of the post.

For this it offers us a block if we use the block editor and an icon/shortcode if we still use the classic editor.

In any of the cases, no matter which method we use, we will have a field to create a new headline, which will be shared when users click on the box that will be displayed within our content, in the chosen place.

When shared, it will offer a “different” headline, in which we can take advantage of introducing hashtags, quotes to other users, etc.

What we get in this way is that the readers of our content have essentially 2 ways to share in their favorite social network our content:

1. With social icons – The shared headline will be the title of the post, usually focused on positioning.
2. Better Click to Tweet boxes – Different headlines extracted (or not) from the content, more focused on virality.

Is there anything to configure?

Not really, the plugin is based on the WordPress philosophy of “Decisions, not options”, so in its settings page, except for links to its premium version, you will only see an interesting box, in case you want to automate the Twitter user creating the tweets.

So no, you don’t need to configure anything, even the user of the tweet you can add it easily.

But this doesn’t mean that the plugin doesn’t have some hidden/advanced settings.

Better Click To Tweet Advanced/Hidden Settings

Not many people know that there are some advanced settings you can do with this plugin, the only thing you have to do is always use the shortcode method, not the plugin block.

Let’s take a look at some interesting and useful ones.

Note: As I have the plugin active myself, in order to share the shortcodes without executing them, there is a space left over between the initial bracket and the beginning of the bctt shortcode.

Do not share URL, only text and via @user

If you don’t want the URL of the post being shared to be automatically added to the tweet, you have to add the parameter url=”no” to the shortcode, like this:

[ bctt tweet="This tweet will change your life, and you don't need a link for it." url="no"]
Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)

Remove the via @user

Another thing you can do is to remove the part of the quote to the user who created the tweet, the “via @user”. For that we would add the via=”no” parameter to the shortcode, like this:

[ bctt tweet="This tweet will change your life, and you don't need to know who wrote it." via="no"]
Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)

Using a custom URL

Another modification you can make in the shortcode is to replace the default URL, which would be that of the post where the Better Click to Tweet box is, with a custom URL, either a part of that post, a relative URL, another website, a product, whatever you want. It would look like this:

[ bctt tweet="This tweet takes you to a custom URL" url="https://wphelp.blog/slug-whatever/"]
Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)

Make links nofollow

Another parameter that will be liked by SEO lovers is that you can add the nofollow link relation to the links in your plugin’s share tweets. Just add nofollow=”yes” to the shortcode.

It would look like this:

[ bctt tweet="This link to tweet should not be followed by search engines." nofollow="yes"]
Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)

Change the “click-to-tweet” text to another one.

Also, and I’m sure you’ll like it, you can change the “click to tweet” text for another one you want, in each tweet box.

The parameter to use in this case in the shortcode is prompt=”New text to prompt to click”.

It would look like this:

[ bctt tweet="Did you know that you can customize the click to tweet text?" prompt="tell your friends"]
Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)

And it would look like this, in real:

Click-to-Tweet Box Style Change – Free and Automatic

The plugin author offers an extension with which to change the styles of the tweet box, but there is a trick you can use to do one of these two things:

1. Automatically change the style of the box.
2. Customize the CSS of the box yourself.

The process is simple:

1. Go to the /wp-content/plugins/better-click-to-tweet/assets/css/ folder and locate the bcttstyle.css file.
2. Move the bcttstyle.css file to the /wp-content/uploads/ folder.

When you have moved the file, the first thing you will notice is that it will automatically change the appearance of all your tweet sharing boxes to a style with a black line separator.

And the second thing is that you can edit that CSS file, located in /wp-content/uploads/, to your liking to modify the look of your click-to-tweet boxes.