You may have seen Twitter contests where to enter you need to “Click Here to Retweet” a certain message. Here is how it is done!
You can add a custom message to the Twitter URL as a link like so:
http://twitter.com/home?status=Custom%20Message%20Here
When you click it, you will be brought to your Twitter home page (if you are logged on already) and the status box will now say “Custom Message Here”. Obviously you can put in whatever text you wish to be displayed.
What do you do if you want to put spaces, hashtags, slashes and other special characters in your message? You can use an URL Encoder like this to do the work for you.
When you encode the URL, be sure to append it to http://twitter.com/home?status=
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the quick walk through. Definitely helped.
Thanks for the tip! I’d love to see how you can directly submit it.
I spent hours trying to figure this out. I knew that I had everything in place.
Just so everyone knows who is doing this, if you have “www.” in your line, then it will keep the %20 when the page opens. I took it out and everything works perfectly.
Thanks for the post.
If you’re not already logged into Twitter when you click on the link, it redirects you to the log-in page, and the tweet is lost. Anyone know if there’s a way to make it so the tweet shows up in your box AFTER you log in?
@keith
wow. I guess I should have read your comment first before I just spent hours on the same thing!! GAH!! Thanks for posting that comment, and great article, Geoff.
For any people still stumbling across this:
For newer twitter accounts, twitter must have the ‘home’ removed from the URL
http://twitter.com/?status=
Seems to be backwards compatible, but God knows where the Twitter folks documented this change…
Thanks! I have updated the post to reflect this.
Here’s another really good url-encoder:
http://quick-encoder.com/url
Does anyone know if there is a similar url encoder for Facebook status?