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.
There are 2 major failings with this method
1. using the meta is useless if the button appears on the home page
2. This subset idea is junk… sorry
I know you have done it that way for your logged in users, but in practice it doesn’t really work.
As an example I might want to include a hastag in a tweet that I don’t want in the title appearing in search engine results pages
Why? Because Google doesn’t ignore a # in the same way as some other charaters such as – or |
So #tweetmeme won’t help rank for posts about “Tweetmeme”
Hi Andy,
To quickly address your points:
1. TweetMeme doesn’t use the page the button appears on, it uses the page the button points to.
The home page meta tag would never be read, except for a button that points explicitly to the home page – in which case, you’d likely want it to display the page (blog) title.
2. The purpose of the restriction is to reduce the chance of the system being “gamed”. This prevents people from fooling users in to tweeting a link that is advertised falsely.
Without the restriction, it would be possible to get the button to generate a tweet like this:
RT @someone Google http://www.bing.com
This only really becomes destructive with shortened links, which of course, most are.
With the restriction however, it’s not possible to alter the generated tweet’s text beyond a subset of the page title. So the same tweet would end up as:
RT @someone Bing http://www.bing.com
We do this for user experience consistency. The end-user has an expectation as to the behaviour of the button (i.e. that the tweet it generates is consistent and relevant).
On hash-tags: We’re working on providing that functionality natively so that site owners can specify hashtags for the tweet.
The primary reason we chose this method is that TweetMeme is more than just a button. We index links from Twitter (or that contain a button) in a similar way to search engines.
By using a meta-tag that instructs our indexer to use a different page title, rather than just the button, we can use that title when the story appears on our site, in our search, through our API etc.
Thanks for your feedback, I hope this addresses your concerns.
You can’t use a page title as a reference – I have been known to change a title 5 times in a day, sometimes just to test a different retweet message.
However if the first tweet for a page comes from a button on a home page, will it actually pick up the meta?
People always get to see the message before it posts, unless they are logged into Tweetmeme – that is the broken functionality.
Otherwise I could safely rotate 5 different “Social Bites” for the same blog post, and measure the performance – they wouldn’t ever match the post title.
If necessary I can even ensure that when someone clicks a tweet that has one message, they get greeted with an appropriate headline that matches, but then I would also need to have multiple URLs for the same post – which I believe your dev teams have full details on.
Your retweet method is going the way of Twitter, with one click, the message staying the same from everyone – that is a direction contrary to how people use Retweet – other than the robots.
Hello, I’m writing to inform you that the trim feature does not seem to be working accordingly (as you say it should).
Is the title structure required as Blog Title >> Post Title to get the trim to work right?
Ours is Post Title | Blog Title and it seems to be having issue with it.
Thanks a bunch.
Hi Paul,
Can you make a post on our technical support forum with a link to a page that exhibits this behaviour and we’ll look in to it.
http://help.tweetmeme.com/forum/forum.php?id=5
Thanks.
Seems to be working for me.
I am trying to deal with a WP plug-in so that the title of each of my posts are tweeted rather than the blog title. I have seen the posting by Nick but can’t make it work! I have tried changing this for this <meta name="tweetmeme-title" content="” /> BUT it does not work! I really am not up on this kind of thing and would appreciate any help. I am wondering should I be changing it verbatim or do I need to add titles or anything? Many thanks
+1 Andy Beard, the tweet message checking is junk.
Don’t get me wrong, the button is great, the fact that you guys try your best to keep this as “spam-less” as possible is great, but your method simply doesn’t apply real life situations.
When I add a post on my blog, a tweet is sent saying:
“[HazardousGaming] ”
On the site, each article has the title . Bassically, I want the button to retweet using the same syntax I used to tweet, that’s with “[HazardousGaming]” as a prefix.
I don’t want to change the webpages titles to match the tweet, but also don’t want to retweet using a different message then the original.
“[HazardousGaming]” is not a subset of “”, here is your break in logic. You should check the two expressions (the meta tag and title tag) and calculate a match percentage upon which you allow (or not) the meta tag.
I forgot that tags are stripped here, sorry. Please add “title” after [HazardousGaming] and in between the empty “” and the comment should make sense
How do you do this for blogger? The code above doesn’t work for me.
Yeah, I sort of get it, reduce spam.
At the moment I’m seeing red because between Google Reader, WordPress and Tweetmeme, I’m being squeezed into delivering content in ways that make no sense for the value I add.
I may stop using Tweetmeme. I’m not sure how it works, but if I can’t figure out how to stop it from using a title of it’s choosing rather than my choosing, it’s just a no go. My choice of title isn’t alway what I want to publish with. In fact, my first choice of title is often really crappy.
So I end up with a crappy, possibly non-converting title running around the web. How could that possibly be useful?
My issues with Google Reader aren’t relevant here, other than how it handles titles is getting in my way.
yes, how can i edit the title in blogger.com? because i use blogger/blogspot ..
thankyou
I am using the tweetmeme button and have costumized it so that the source is my company’s name and so that it only tweets the title of the post (not the blog).
However, I would like the automatically add the hashtags #fairtrade and #Guatemala to every tweet that gets sent through tweetmeme. This will ensure that the retweets are seen by a larger and more specifically targeted audience.
Is it possible to edit the code in order to do this?
Thanks.
Doesn’t work for Blogger. Help?