• Posted Sept. 4, 2012, 9 p.m. - 11 years, 7 months ago

Retweet Your PDFs and Become Viral

People are effectively using social media to expand their presence throughout the web.  Facebook, Twitter, blogs and web pages are all interlinked by those who are savvy enough.

Tweets seem to be the leading method to spread your presence.  Take a look at the tweets.  They are usually showing a URL which points to a blog or a web page to gather readers.  Products are also publicized in this way with the tweet pointing to a web landing page.

You may have a whitepaper that explains a product you have or even solves a problem and you want to spread this document around.  To just rely on people emailing the document or link to friends is foolish.

A simple Retweet could reach hundreds of friends of a single person.  And a properly structured Retweet could be pushed to viral proportions.

The question is how to do this.  We will tell you the secret: embed a Retweet into your PDF document.  That way, anyone who reads your document can Retweet it to all their followers.  That is how documents become viral.

You need to first create a link to where your paper is stored in a PDF format.  Let’s say you have it stored in http://yourwebsite123456.com/whitepapers/yourdocnamehere.pdf.  Since this is a rather long URL, get a short one by using http://bit.ly.  This is the shortened link we created without creating an account or signing in: http://bit.ly/QjyEQS.  Creating an account will allow you to track the access of your link, so you may want to consider this.

Next, log into your Twitter account and search for a unique tag that you might use.  Since our nonexistent PDF covers embedded tweets see if #diyembedretweet is used and use it if it is free.

Now create the retweet as follows:

http://twitter.com/?status=RT: @your_twitter_name_here Get Your Free Retweet Embedding Report Here http://bit.ly/QjyEQS %23diyembedretweet

Notice that we have substituted %23 in place of the hash mark (#).

Take the Retweet graphic we created and insert it in your document at least two or three times: on the first page, the last page and on an index page if you have one.  It is a very long report, put a few more Retweets in there.

Next link these Retweer graphics to your Retweet link you just created.  To do this in Acrobat Professional, go to Tools | Advanced Editing and then select the Link Tool.  Then draw a box around the Retweet graphic.  Select Open a web page from the radio buttons, click Next and enter the URL you created (http://twitter.com/?status=RT: @your_twitter_name_here Get Your Free Retweet Embedding Report Here http://bit.ly/QjyEQS #diyembedretweet)

Now Retweet your document to your followers and start becoming viral.