Navigate the Blogosphere: Customize Your Shareaholic Tweets

If you use Shareaholic you're either going to shake your head and say yesssss while reading this or you're going to think to yourself, what on earth is she talking about?

If you're the latter? I'm talking to you.

Shareaholic is a wonderful tool.

When I got my blog revamped and finally figured out how to safely manipulate the code and whatnot I decided Shareaholic was the way to go. It's so easy and benefits my blog so much I couldn't NOT do it.

In case you're still not sure what I'm talking about I'll clarify a bit more before diving into the dirty details.

* Warning - this is an image-heavy post. That's not usually my style but I'm a visual learner so I thought it would be smart to be a visual teacher, too. *

First, these buttons you see on your site and others?

They come from Shareaholic. If you didn't do your blog design and haven't made any edits to the HTML you might not know this. 

It's really simple to use and truly helps people promote your work. The problem is, Twitter. 

You surely know from experience that when you go to share a post from someone and the tweet gets filled in for you with the title - that's pretty awesome and simple - right? 

I love it. I love to be able to not only share someone's work, but to be able to both, give them complete credit AND a notification that they've been shared. 

Many bloggers out there don't make this easy on me. Or us. 

First, they don't have the tools on their site to make sharing simple. That's HUGE. Seriously. HUGE. 

Add the icons. It's easy and a MUST.

BUT. Don't stop there. 

There's more work to be done. 

When someone goes to tweet from your site they want to give you credit. And someone like me will usually change out your handle to ensure you get it. Other people aren't going to bother with that. And who can blame them? None of us want Shareaholic getting credit for our work. But you've got to be the one to make sure that happens.

This is what it looks like when someone tweets from your blog with the Shareaholic button. 

Thing is - the default is set to say @Shareaholic. NOT @whateveryourTwitterhandleis.

Let's change that immediately. I promise it's really easy. And I know people aren't not doing it because it's hard. They're not doing it because either they have no idea that it's happening - and seriously - why would you think that the tool you're using wouldn't credit you for your work - right? Or they just haven't taken the time to look into it. 

Here's a step-by-step for you. 

1. Head to Shareaholic.com. (If you don't yet have an account you'll need to set that up. This post is assuming you already use the tool for sharing on your website.)

2. Go to your Website Dashboard (dropdown from your profile name in the upper right-hand corner).

3. Go to Settings. 

4. Go to Sharing.

5. Once in there you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. Your default goes to @shareaholic but you want to change it to @yourTwitterhandle 

6. SAVE.

That's it. You're done.

As my daughter says, Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy. *Don't ask!*

So - what do you think? Make sense?

Any questions? Clarifications needed?

Please ask.

Because sometimes I think it's helpful to hear from someone who isn't a tech addict, though knows her way around a little HTML just the same.

So I wrote this one. It's been brewing for a while as I wanted to get it up last year, but life gets in the way sometimes and so here it is for you now.

If you're a regular reader you know I don't do these posts very often. I've got this Navigate the Blogosphere series happening but I do them too infrequently for even my own taste.

Check out my previous posts on The best possible ways to use Facebook, the NC Blogger Network, and if you just want to pick my brain on blogging in general I have a variety of posts under my Blogging category that cover things from conferences to connections.

And let me know if there's anything you'd like to read about here that I might not have touched on yet or possibly even consider covering. 'Cause 2015 is the year of the reader! Or something. Hey, maybe I'm actually onto something there ...

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