It’s Twitter Tip Tuesday — every Tuesday we’ll focus on one Twitter Tip and show you how to integrate it into your social media strategy. This week we’ll show you how to add the official Twitter “Tweet” Button to your website or blog.

Is your website “sticky?” What’s the bounce rate of your blog? If those questions are foreign to you, you probably don’t know One of the most tangible benefits of being on Twitter is that, in general, people want to share interesting and informative information with their followers. For example, when your followers see an interesting status update from your company’s Twitter account, if they retweet that update, they expose your message to all of their followers as well. This potential for building brand awareness while naturally engaging with your followers is what sets Twitter apart from traditional broadcast advertising.

By inserting the Twitter Tweet button on your blog, in effect, you’re enabling your audience to become brand advocates on your behalf. When you include the official Tweet button anywhere on your page, it signals to your readers that your content can be easily shared right from the blog article or webpage itself. When someone clicks the button, it automatically links to his or her Twitter account (assuming that person is logged in to Twitter), and creates a tweet with a link to the page where the button was clicked. The reader still has the option to edit the tweet before sending it to his or her followers on Twitter.

Customize Your Tweet Button

Navigate to the Tweet Button resource page on Twitter. In Step 1, you’ll be presented with a few different display options for the Tweet button. Along with the button, you can include a vertical tweet counter, a horizontal tweet counter, or no counter at all.

Next, click the “Tweet text” tab to specify the text that will be included in the tweet when people click the Tweet button. You can include the title of your page (this is particularly effective if you’ve applied good SEO practices to your pages), or you can add your own custom text to the tweet. In either case, Twitter will automatically append a shortened link to your page.

Click the “URL” tab if you’d like to specify or customize the webpage address (URL) in your tweet. By default, the tweet will include a link to the URL of the page that the Tweet button is on (recommended). You can specify a link to a different location, but be careful with this; some people may consider the tweet as “spam” if it redirects to a unexpected webpage.

Finally, click the “Language” tab if you’d like to change the language of the Tweet button itself. The content of the tweet will always be rendered in the language specified in people’s Twitter account settings.

Recommend People to Follow

In Step 2, you can add more functionality and value to the Tweet button by including up to two recommended Twitter accounts for people to follow. You can include a personal and a corporate Twitter account as recommendations, or any two Twitter accounts that you’d like to promote.

For example, after someone clicks the Tweet button from your blog, and then sends the suggested tweet, he or she will be presented with an additional option to follow the Twitter accounts you assigned in this step. This recommendation is distinct from the original tweet, so you don’t need to worry about going over the 140 character limit for status updates. This can be a powerful way to get additional exposure for the Twitter account (or accounts) associated with your website or blog.

Copy the Code or Create Your Own

Once you’ve made all of your desired customizations to the Tweet button, Twitter provides you with the corresponding HTML code in a text field near the bottom of the page. Copy and paste this code anywhere you’d like the Tweet button to appear on your website or blog.

If you’re not sure how to complete this step yourself, consult with your webmaster, or any other web-design professional. If you’re more of a do-it-yourselfer, you can even create your own Tweet button using the developer guidelines provided by Twitter.

You Could be Featured on Twitter Tip Tuesday

We’d like to invite you to submit your own Twitter success stories to be considered for future Twitter Tip Tuesday articles. Our goal is to reiterate the value of using Twitter for business by highlighting real world success stories from our readers.