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Let your readers tell their friends about your site with Social Twist

Posted by on 2nd Nov 2008 Social Media 7 comments

A new ‘Tell-a-Friend’ widget service has just launched called SocialTwist. There are dozens of these services around but SocialTwist makes it a little easier for visitors to recommend your blog to a friend as it lets you login to your email account, messenger, blog or Twitter account without having to leave your site.

This video explains how the service works :

After a quick sign up you are given code to add to your blog. Here’s an example of the widget you get :

Through the control panel you can also see stats showing you how your readers are recommending pages of your blog.

The stats are a nice addition though it still feels like SocialTwist is lacking something. Whilst you can change the colours of the page and the title, you cannot add your blog logo so the page looks quite generic. Also, there doesn’t appear to be a direct link back to your blog.

It’s a free service so if you are looking for a ‘Tell a Friend’ type widget I recommend trying it out.

Link : SocialTwist

Kevin Muldoon is a webmaster and blogger who lives in Central Scotland. His current project is WordPress Mods; a blog which focuses on WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tutorials, News and Modifications and useful resources such as 101 Places To Find Images For Your Blog Posts.

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7 comments - Leave a reply
  • Posted by Mario on 2nd Nov 2008

    Thanks a lot for sharing with us.

    I will check this out seems to be interesting.

    http://www.mariolist.com

    Mario
  • Posted by Alex the Freelance T on 2nd Nov 2008

    I just signed up to test this and I'm pretty disappointed. I use Firefox normally and the popout worked, but when I click on "Gmail" or "AIM", nothing happens. The box that should pop up for me just doesnt.

    So I opened up Opera and the popout doesn't even work there. I believe it's verrrrry buggy right now or there's something wrong with their code, because 4 different computers / browsers and it won't work for me on any of them.
  • Posted by Mike Huang on 2nd Nov 2008

    Cool, this is like socialmarker except this is used on those social "instant messaging" type of programs/sites :D

    -Mike
  • Posted by Vivek L on 3rd Nov 2008

    Alex, I think there is a mismatch in the expectation from Tell-a-Friend. SocialTwist's tell a friend service is primarily for personal recommendations.

    Unlike social bookmarking services which redirect you to another page where you can bookmark/share the blog post, Tell-a-Friend lets you login from the widget into one of the services (GMail, AIM, etc) and announce content to your contacts in that service.

    So it won't really popup stuff as you have found with other services. Hope that clarifies things. If you have any problems, write to the SocialTwist support team and they would help you out.

    Kevin, thanks for covering Tell-a-Friend on your blog. Adding your blog logo and skinning it to suit your site is possible and is a premium offering.
  • Posted by Rajeev Edmonds on 3rd Nov 2008

    The service looks very promising. I have signed up. Will definitely give it a try. Thanks for sharing.
  • Posted by Angel Cuala on 3rd Nov 2008

    I think this is worth to try. However, the widget seems to be a bit informal to me.
  • Posted by Clare on 3rd Nov 2008

    Thanks for the reminder! I registered with this site last week and completely forgot to add the widget to my website. I think it sounds like a very interesting concept.