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!
We are pleased to announce that today all comments left on TweetMeme will get shortened with the URL http://rep.ly – this will be exclusively used for comments so your followers when seeing a comment will always know you have just left a comment on TweetMeme.
Secondly we have made the integration with Twitter even better now allowing you to seamlessly reply to any Tweet on twitter that was associated with a particular story. This means you can quickly start a conversation with those who are already interested in that story.
Features
Each comment can be retweeted (either within TweetMeme or back on Twitter by retweeting the rep.ly link)
rep.ly exclusively used for comments
You can reply to more than one twitter user
Can reply to tweets + comments at the same time
Can embed video, images + stories
Thread view for individual comments
Live-updates
You can join the discussion on the new features here
Did you know that when you are logged into TweetMeme (via Twitter OAuth) that the retweet button becomes even simpler to use, No? Well I have recorded a very quick video that explains the difference between logged-in and logged-out
Amongst the many new features we launched as part of V2 was the new bookmarklet – this is a really simple button that you drag into your bookmark toolbar on your browser – and when you are on any blog, video, image – in fact any website you can press the TweetMeme button and it will take you to the story page for that site back onto TweetMeme, that then gives you a quick and easy way to RETWEET or comment.
I have included the Bookmarklet below – just click and drag it onto your bookmark toolbar.
Today we launch TweetMeme V2 – we are calling it version ‘V2’ as today’s release really is a complete revamp of the site that encompasses a total rewrite of our scoring system, filtering engine and a whole raft of user interface enhancements and tweaks. It also incorporates the new commenting system which we previewed last week.
We look forward to getting all your feedback on this new version, please leave comments on this comment thread.
Ranking Content
The new site will have more varied and better quality content, this is achieved through better scoring of stories including a new ‘kudos’ score for individual Twitter users, plus we have a new ‘reporting’ mechanism allowing our users to flag content as abusive, spam or ‘This Sucks!’
Filtering
click to enlarge
The filtering engine is now at Version 3 codenamed ‘Pickle’ – this is our most advanced system yet allowing the real-time filtering of 10’s of millions of stories per day based upon our own programming language ‘Pickle Code’.
This release is future proof for scalability and also allows us to plug in new data sets as they become available. Included on the right is a screenshot of our tool that allows us to drag and drop rules that produces ‘Pickle Code’ – In the coming weeks we will do a feature on the architecture of this new system.
Commenting
The new commenting system also goes live, this includes the ability to retweet individual comments (when they are good!) replying to multiple users, live updates and a really tight integration into Twitter. For a full description of the commenting features previewed“>go here.
TweetMeme is also working with the team at JS-Kit to import the comments into the Echo Stream. TweetMeme will also be recommending and distributing Echo as the preferred solution to track the distributed conversation on blogs.
From Khris Lous CEO of JS-Kit
Echo is commited to re-assembling the distributed conversation back to blogs and other sites – working with TweetMeme is a natural step along that path
We are soon launching a new TweetMeme but first we have a new member of the family, retwt.me.
KISS
We like to apply the KISS principle to everything we do, and retwt.me is KISS at its best, three simple functions.
1. Shorten – Give us a link and in fraction of a second we will have shortened it
2. Share – We give you simple tools to share the link out to your favorite sites
3. Analyse – A simple service means easy, simple to understand analytics
Future
We have no plans to extend the service beyond these very simple principles, it will be used initially within TweetMeme to shorten comment links and added into the ‘pool’ of available shorteners.
I was testing the new site tonight and thought I would share a quick (5 min) video of using the comments. Look forward to getting your feedback and also putting this baby live! (click in bottom-right corner of video to get the high-res version.)
I wanted to share a few numbers about the growth of TweetMeme and explain why so many users are using our service. In the last 30 days we have served 1.6 billion retweet buttons, and we seeing an average growth of 20% week-on-week. The list of sites who trust our brand and our scalability read like the who’s who of the blog world The Huffingtonpost, Techcrunch, Mashable and perezhilton to name but a few.
Trusted Brand
We believe that our focus on innovation (with the help of our active community) and the continued reliability of our service is important in building a trusted brand. Below is list of the key features that differentiate us.
One-Click retweeting
RSS + Email Buttons
A range of plugins both by us and 3rd party developers.
We know that publishers/blogs use our button to get further traction, but that is only one side of the coin. How do you know if your story was a success beyond just the retweet count? We have been working with partners to build a analytics package that is tailored for our users to understand how’s and why’s of the spread of a story. We will be starting a private beta next week (at same time as the Public release of the new version of TweetMeme), for now I have included a few sample screenshots.
Many people have said that the comments left on blogs are often better than the blog post itself, so when we started looking at commenting on TweetMeme our primary goal was to allow good quality comments to be retweeted.
So today we are giving a sneak peek into one aspect of the new TweetMeme release which is coming early next week that fulfills that vision and a whole lot more.
Commenting
click screenshot to enlarge
We thought long and hard on how we could introduce comments to TweetMeme that would meet a number of goals including our retweet functionality.
Reply mechanism that feels familiar to Twitter users
Ability to embed media into comments
Retweeting
I am sure everyone has found that discussions on blogs ‘can’ be absolutely compelling and that it is not unusual to find single comments that run to numbers of pages and would in themselves often warrant being their own blog post. These often go overlooked by a large proportion of readership that doesn’t have the time to read through all the comments on a single story.
Just like our normal story retweet functionality each Twitter user can only retweet a comment once (i.e. one vote per user). Within TweetMeme this means a simple one-click retweet which we send on your behalf behind the scenes, for users on Twitter they can retweet the unique link that points at that comment and we will count any further retweets towards the total. This gives an individual comment the same chance of spreading virally as any normal story.
Finally we make it possible to switch from the default ordered by date, to a ordered by ‘retweets’ so for a particular story see the most popular comments. On a story with hundreds of comments we think just like TweetMeme the ability to filter by the retweet popularity will be valuable in finding the quality comments.
Replying
We love the simplicity of Twitter and especially the ability to reply to multiple people. We wanted to duplicate this within TweetMeme but also make it quicker + simpler for new users. So all you have to do is click on the ‘reply’ button and the name of the person gets put in a ‘TO:’ box, click on another reply (on a different comment) and that name will also be added.
And just like Twitter you can click on ‘Replies’ (Twitter now calls it ‘mentions’) and you will only see the comments that have been directed back at you. On top of this when you post a comment on TweetMeme it also sends a Tweet to Twitter which includes the @[name] of each Twitter user, so even if they are not on TweetMeme at the time to see that you have replied, they will see it on back on Twitter (or any clients such as TweetDeck.)
Media Simplicity
We love short URL’s for their tracking and ability to be easily spread about the social web. For the average user they can also hide the final content and result in them not getting clicked. When we sat down and thought how we could encourage the embedding of media and the use of short URL’s the solution was simple, just use inherent ability of TweetMeme to un-shorten and aggregate the content at the end of the link.
You can see from the example above that the comment includes three links which have been annotated and reference the list of media below the content. When I wrote the comment I actually copy + pasted three short URL’s but TweetMeme went and un-shortened them. Then went and found the content associated with the links, e.g. title, body of the post and any media attached.
And Finally
This is only part of a major overhaul to TweetMeme that includes our 3rd generation of news filtering, new and much improved spam detection, improvements in search and a whole host of other smaller changes. We thank everyone who continues to support us and uses our Retweet Button. You can be sure we will continue to innovate in this space.
@Totally_Toni if you turn it back on and then click where you see the ? it will tell you the cause. :) 2009/11/20
@Totally_Toni I suspect that what you are experiencing is a conflict with 1 of your other plugins as its not currently showing on your site. 2009/11/20
