Follow Me on Twitter CTA on Ghost and WordPress

The other day I read a post on Hacker News about premature optimization in web application development. This was an excellent post in its own right, but one thing that jumped out at me was the call to action from the author to follow him on Twitter at the end of his post. I liked that it was subtle, simple, and effective  (I followed him on Twitter). Naturally, I stole this idea for my own blogs. This method uses the Follow Button provided by Twitter. In this post, I will show you how to add your own “Follow Me on Twitter” Call to Action on  your own WordPress or Ghost blog.

WordPress

I used the Bottom of Every Post Wordpress Plugin because I found that hacking the main wordpress loop caused my CTA to show up at the very bottom of a page rather than at the end of the post content. In addition, I made a small change to this plugin to make sure that it only appears on single posts rather than on the home page. Edit bottom-of-every-post/bottom_of_every_post.php from the WordPress Plugins Editor and update the method to be:

if( is_single() && file_exists( $fileName )){

 /* open the text file and read its contents */

 $theFile = fopen( $fileName, "r");
 $msg = fread( $theFile, filesize( $fileName ));
 fclose( $theFile );

 /* detect the old message in code to try and eradicate my name and #
 showing up on strange websites that are run by lazy people */

 if( $msg == "<p>Call for an estimate 724-498-1551<br><a href=\"mailto:corey.salzano@gmail.com\">corey.salzano@gmail.com</a></p>" ){
 $msg = "<p>Thank you for installing the Bottom of every post WordPress plugin. To find out how to change or remove this message, read <a href=\"http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bottom-of-every-post/installation/\">the instructions</a>.</p>";
 }

 /* append the text file contents to the end of `the_content` */
 return $content . stripslashes( $msg );
 } else{

 /* if `the_content` belongs to a page or our file is missing
 the result of this filter is no change to `the_content` */

 return $content;
 }

The key here is

is_single()

Next, edit bottom-of-every-post/bottom_of_every_post.txt and add your call to action. Mine looks like this.

<p>
 If you made it this far, you should probably follow me on twitter. :) 
 <a class="twitter-follow-button" href="https://twitter.com/levlaz"> Follow @levlaz</a>
</p>

<script>window.twttr = (function(d, s, id) {
 var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
 t = window.twttr || {};
 if (d.getElementById(id)) return t;
 js = d.createElement(s);
 js.id = id;
 js.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";
 fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);

 t._e = [];
 t.ready = function(f) {
 t._e.push(f);
 };

 return t;
}(document, "script", "twitter-wjs"));</script>

You only need to replace your twitter username in the above example and it should work as is.

I used ghosts code-injection tool to get this to work for every page. I added the following two scripts to the Blog Footer.

<script> 
 article = document.getElementsByClassName('post-content');
 child = document.createElement('p');
 cta = '<p class="follow"> If you read this far, thank you! Follow me on Twitter to stay up to date on what the fuss is all about.<br />';
 link = '<a class="twitter-follow-button" href="https://twitter.com/tralevnet"> Follow @tralevnet</a></p>'
 child.innerHTML = cta + link;
 article[0].appendChild(child);
</script>

<script>
 window.twttr = (function(d, s, id) {
 var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
 t = window.twttr || {};
 if (d.getElementById(id)) return t;
 js = d.createElement(s);
 js.id = id;
 js.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";
 fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);

 t._e = [];
 t.ready = function(f) {
 t._e.push(f);
 };

 return t;
}(document, "script", "twitter-wjs"));
</script>

In the example above you need to change your call to action as well as your twitter username for it to work. I also added a custom style to the Blog Header

<style> 
.follow {
 line-height: 1.5;
 width: 50%;
 padding: 15px;
 border: dashed 1px lightgrey;
 font-size: smaller;
 color: #555;
 font-family: sans-serif;
 font-weight: bold;
 }

 .twitter-follow-button {
 margin-top: 10px;
 }
</style>

That’s pretty much it. You can go wild with the style to your hearts content. I like this simple CTA and I am excited to see how effective it is on my own blogs.

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