Customising the Title
Many users have been asking us for the ability to customise the title that the TweetMeme button sends as part of its tweet. However, we’ve been generally wary of providing this functionality as it has the potential to make the button behave in an unpredictable way – specifically, it would allow the site owner to use their users for spam.
The main reason this feature has been requested so much is so that content authors can separate a site/blog title from the content title. For example, a page with the title “TweetMeme Blog » Retweet Button Explained” would result in the following tweet:
RT @talkTweetMeme TweetMeme Blog » Retweet Button Explained http://retwt.me/33K
Since the blog title offers little value to the tweet, it would be preferable to remove it. This is now possible using the new TweetMeme WordPress Plugin 1.6, or manually using the “tweetmeme-title” meta-tag for other platforms.
Adding this tag to the HEAD section (between the <head> and </head> tags) of a page will override it’s title:
<meta name="tweetmeme-title" content="Retweet Button Explained" />
This will make any buttons that point to this page use this title for their tweet:
RT @talkTweetMeme Retweet Button Explained http://retwt.me/33K
Of course, many websites use automated systems to generate their page titles, for example, in WordPress you can use the following in your header.php template and all blog posts will use the post title as the text of the tweet:
<meta name="tweetmeme-title" content="<?php wp_title(''); ?>" />
There is one major caveat to this system. Our systems require the tweetmeme-title to be a strict subset of the page title. i.e. The tweetmeme-title must be derived directly from your original page title – if it is not, it will be ignored. This is to ensure that the tweet the button sends can always be predicted by the user to be relevant to the page they are reading.
