It always amazes me how things converge onto a point in what seems to be complete coincidence, but when it happens time and again you see that it is just a natural convergence of multiple minds pushing forward ideas towards a natural conclusion.

And so when I arrived at the Techcrunch Crunchup I was not surprised to find that a number of companies (including Twitter themselves ) would be talking about Twitter based advertising.

I was also at the Crunchup to announce our own new Twitter advertising model called Adtweets – which is a new ad-platform that allows established ad-networks to leverage the power of the retweet (something we feel we have extensive knowledge within.) by allowing current display adverts to gain a retweetable element. If you want to read the full details we have a separate post.

Retweet Analytics

I wanted to share some fascinating numbers on how content gets disseminated across twitter via Retweets, we recently launched our own Analytics package that allows individual stories to be analysed in great detail.

An interesting fact that has an immense impact for anyone trying to advertise on Twitter is that when I analysed 20 of the top tier Twitter accounts (e.g. with followers of more than 500,000) I found that on average only 35% of the retweets that a link gained were directly originated from their own Twitter account.

So as an example a recent Mashable story with 1598 retweets I found that only 586 were a direct result of their pushing it out to the@mashable Twitter account (which has 1,751,213 followers) and the largest proportion (825 of them) was in fact from originating retweets (e.g. clicking our retweet button).

The second interesting set of numbers is the click data that then results from all those retweets – again from the same story we find that it was clicked 12558 times (split across 5 different shortener services) of that total 8196 were direct (e.g. mostly from Twitter clients such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck) 2896 were from the Twitter.com and the 1539 were from 80+ other Twitter web based clients.

What do I draw from these facts? The first is that any model must be inclusive of external clients. So in the instance of Robert Scoble’s ‘SuperTweets‘ the Twitter clients will need a big incentive to display those adverts – e.g. a revenue share. My gut feeling is that in-tweet advertising is still the only effective route forward – just because it applies to the KISS principle.

My second conclusion is that distribution into the mainstream Twitter user-base is absolutely crucial to getting the message heard by the greatest number of users.

Lastly I would like to show you the kind of advertising that I think is the future – and that works perfectly with a model of retweeting. [disclosure: Sun Microsystems is a partner of TweetMeme]

Full details of our own advertising platform can be found here.

TweetMeme is launching Adtweets! Nick Halstead is at the Real-Time Crunchup in San Francisco today to reveal and demo our new, and exciting product! The idea behind this product was based around wanting to reward advertisers for using great, interactive and engaging adverts.  The Adtweets are a way of putting pressure on advertisers to improve the standard of adverts, and give the audience a chance to decide, and essentially vote, on what they like. Produce a good advert that your audience likes, and you can easily tap into the viral nature of Twitter and the ‘retweet effect’, which will then dramatically increase your reach.

The system is very simple and the TweetMeme Retweet Button can be integrated into any standard IAB advertisement size. Advertisers have the choice between our compact button, or our standard button…..and of course you can use our TweetMeme Analytics to easily monitor the success of your campaign. The Adtweets can be served on any website, as well as on TweetMeme.com. With the support of Federated Media there is a large pool of publishers able to give advertisers a targeted audience of  social media friendly readers, who are likely to retweet engaging adverts to their friends and Followers.

TweetMeme is also re-launching Featured Tweets….Even more powerful, to help promote particular stories, and encourage the sharing of important content to other Twitter users.  The potential value of the featured tweets was apparent in the first version, but there were some essential elements missing. After taking on board invaluable feedback from both users and customers, the service was suspended. It was back to the drawing board, and what has emerged is a new Featured Tweet system that sponsors can use to bring relevent news and stories quickly to the attention of the TweetMeme Community, who then have the opportunity to retweet the story to their Twitter Followers and so on.

The aim of this system is to give potentially viral stories a little helping hand. The improvements include better targeting of your Featured Tweet, analytics to track your story, a simple, easy to use interface, and a reduced number of sponsored stories per page.  The result? An immediate increase in exposure, an encouragement in the spread of content, increased traffic and more Twitter Followers – for sponsors….And a happier user base, with only 1 sponsored story per page.

Want to find out more, have any questions, or want to be one of the first to take advantage of this, please contact sales@tweetmeme.com!

Over the past few months, at every event we’ve been to Nick and I have been taking a small quantity of TweetMeme t-shirts with us to hand out to people we know and who love to tweet!  On Thursday Kate and I will be at Social Media 09 and if those attending are lucky then we may just bring a few more with us to the event!

Here’s a few pics of the different designs.  The choice of descriptions actually came out of a sticker design competition we ran a while back, the details of our imaginative Twitter fans can be found here! We have male & female in a range of sizes so no one feels left out!

By pure chance today the top story over on TweetMeme has been this one about cool Geek T-shirts!  Maybe our ones will get in there when we give out more of them!  If you are wanting exposure at events and want to sponsor your logo on the next batch of our tshirts then do get in touch with us as we are looking into getting another batch printed soon.  This batch have our partners Dedipower and Sun StartUp Essentials on them!

We continually listen to what publishers want and a repeat request is to support mobile users. The problem with mobile is that a large proportion of users use Twitter applications to do their tweeting. So today we would like to announce that we are supporting native retweeting on iPhone Android and Blackberry.

When we serve a retweet button to a mobile browser we switch it to a mobile specific version – and when the user clicks the button it sends them to a screen that lets them choose the mobile application that they use. And for users who do not yet have a Twitter app – we suggest a few to use. And if you do use Twitter on your mobile browser we can redirect to that as well. And of course we remember your choice for any further retweeting.

And just a quick reminder why we server over 120 million retweet buttons a day.

• 80% of our users now use our OAuth retweet button, this means that the user never leaves your website.
• Support for 15 Short URL services
• Support for RSS / Email buttons
• Free Retweet Analytics + PRO Analytics
• The recognised brand for retweeting

Look out for the new release early next week.