Twitter for Websites FAQ

The Tweet Button has been tested for support with the most popular browsers. Browsers which do not support the required javascript features will still function but will only see a default hyperlink. Browsers which fully support the Tweet Button are:

• Firefox 3.x
• Chrome 4
• Safari 4, 5
• Opera 10
• Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8

The Tweet Button is available in English (en), French (fr), German (de), Italian (it), Spanish (es), Korean (ko) and Japanese (ja). To specify the language for the Tweet Button use the lang property and set it to the two letter ISO-639-1 language code.

For example:

• For English either omit the lang property or use lang="en"
• For Japanese use lang="ja"
• For Spanish use lang="es"

Tweet Button without count

Tweet The Tweet Button is 55 pixels wide and 20 pixels high.

Tweet Button with horizontal count

Tweet A Tweet Button with horizontal count is 110 pixels wide and 20 pixels high. The 110 pixel width is made up from 55 pixels for the button, 3 pixels for the space separating the count from the button and 52 pixels for the count itself.

Tweet Button with vertical count

Tweet With a vertical count the combined dimensions are 55 pixels wide by 62 pixels high. The 62 pixel height is made up from 20 pixels for the button, 2 pixels for the space separating the count from the button and 40 pixels for the count itself.

Internationalised Tweet Buttons

Internationalised Tweet Buttons have slightly different dimensions.

The Tweet Button is hosted on a high performance content distribution network and is kept separate from twitter.com. This means if twitter.com goes down your site will not be affected and the button will still display. What will happen is when a user presses the Tweet Button the Share Box will fail to load and users will instead see a Twitter error page. Also, in some cases, the count may not be displayed.

If you want to use more than one Tweet Button on a page you there are a couple of things you will want to check.

1. If you are using the javascript Tweet Button, make sure you only include the widgets.js javascript once. The best place to put the javascript is before the closing </body> tag of your page.
2. To avoid duplication of content on your page consider using the rel="me" and rel="canonical" tags in place of the via and url data points on each Tweet Button.

Only two accounts are displayed and by default the via user is shown first with the first related account shown afterwards. If the user is a follower of the via user the Share Box will instead show the first two related accounts the user isn’t a follower of. No accounts are displayed if the user follows all of the suggested accounts (via and related).

Learn more about related accounts.

In this early stage of the Tweet Button the count API is private. This means you need to use either our javascript or iframe Tweet Button to be able to render the count. As our systems scale we will look to make the count API public for developers to use.

To improve performance we cache the count before displaying it. The cache is updated frequently but on some occasions it may look like your count is not increasing while the cache is updated. In addition, the count only includes public Tweets meaning a Tweet from a protected account will not cause an increase.

Additionally, there is currently a requirement that your server support HTTP HEAD requests in order to update the count properly. An easy way to check this is to use the command-line curl program, passing the -I (capital i) flag. A successful request should have a HTTP 200 OK response:

$ curl -I https://dev.twitter.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:16:39 GMT
Server: Apache
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Expires: Sun, 11 Mar 1984 12:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Last-Modified: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:16:20 +0000
Vary: Cookie,Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
...

An unsuccessful request may return a HTTP 4xx or 5xx error:

$ curl -I http://baddomain.example.com
HTTP/1.1 405 Method Not Allowed
...

We started counting a couple of weeks before the launch of the Tweet Button. This means links which have been shared on Twitter before July 2010 will not contributed towards the count. However, all publicly Tweeted links since then have been counted and the Tweet Button will reflect that.

The Tweet Button will share all URLs sent to it as t.co links that redirect to the URL you provide. On twitter.com the t.co link is then displayed as the URL you provided. In client applications we provide an entities element that tells application developers the information they need to display the t.co link as your URL.

When asking how many times a link has been Tweeted the Tweet Button uses the URL you ask it to share. If this is a shortened URL this will often return 0. This is because Tweet Button counts the final destination of the URL passed to it, not the shortened one.

If you are experiencing this problem you should use the counturl property and set it equal to the final destination of your short URL. For an example see the Tweet Button documentation.

Yes, the tweet button works over HTTPS.