Tag Archives: twitter
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!
It was decided today that we don’t tell you enough about what goes on behind the scenes at TweetMeme; in other words, what we do in the office when we aren’t busy keeping you updated with the latest Twitter news and making sure the site works well!
So, here is a quick rundown of the past couple of days…
The first thing to mention is that @nicktelford celebrated his birthday this week! He was brought some pink balloons and some lovely presents which all related to his favourite celebrity — Miley Cyrus. Needless to say he was ecstatic when he opened them! To make his day even better we then played his new Miley Cyrus CD… unfortunately that was short lived due to “noise” complaints from other companies in the building. Clearly they didn’t appreciate Miley as much as we did!
In other news… when I started working for TweetMeme almost 3 weeks ago I was a girl with a slight Facebook obsession. Unfortunately, working for a company which runs a Twitter app, this was not acceptable for certain members of the TweetMeme team (*cough* @dtsn and @chris_alexander). So 6 days ago they started the process of “converting” me over to Twitter. While I hate to admit it, they were successful, and I now have two programmes on my computer which will keep me updated with Twitter, as well as my Twitter homepage permenantly being open on my browser. This caused everyone at TweetMeme to use Twitter as the “water cooler”… rather than turning around to talk to one another, we now just converse via Twitter instead… (talking is so overrated!!)
Finally, the TweetMeme Nazbatag Bunny needs a special mention. She is currently taking a holiday to the other end of the office, so has been keeping me entertained and Chris annoyed for the past week… it has been very fun making her send Twitter updates of the wrong time! Today Chris did something very foolish and created a programme which allows us to send messages that Bunny will read out (something tells me he immediately regretted it!). If you want to see what Bunny is saying to all of us, feel free to follow her via Twitter.
We never rest on our laurels here at TweetMeme HQ and have been beavering away on a range of improvements. I wanted to give you a sneak peak at a few new buttons launching next week.
Firstly one big change we have already made is to remove the (via @tweetmeme) from the end of any retweets. This will give a little more room at the end of tweets to be retweeted again.
Image Button
The current retweet button is a clever little thing – it can redirect you to Twitter to retweet but also if your logged into TweetMeme (via OAuth) it sends the tweet behind the scenes and leaves you on the site you were currently browsing, this we call ‘one-click retweeting’. The downside is that Javascript can only live in certain places on the web, i.e. in a web browser.
We think there are lots of other places you may want to get retweeted from so we have come up with ‘image buttons’. These look identical to the current retweet button (an example is on the right) with the same live-retweet count, the big difference is that it is rendered as a image which means you can put it anywhere that you can put a normal image. Here are some ideas we had for using it,
- RSS Feeds – JavaScript does not work inside RSS (most RSS readers strip it out because of XSS security issues) so the button is perfect to allow your users to read your article and then retweet it.
- Emails – You can embed it into an HTML email to promote any link you like.
- Wordpress.com – Some sites like wordpress.com do not allow you to embed Javascript, but you can use this button instead.
Domain Count
We wanted a way that sites could show off how much they are getting retweeted beyond just the individual story retweet counts. So we came up with the ‘Weekly Retweet’ chicklet, it shows the weekly total number of retweets for your whole website. The counter re-calculates every 24 hours and the colour can be customized (examples on the right).
Analytics
Lastly we will be soon launching a much more detailed analytics package for website owners. You can already use TweetMeme to track the trend of a particular story (example here) and get the list of people who retweeted the story.
Websites can already track their weekly trends of retweets using TweetMeme (Example here) this is useful, but we wanted to give much more detail. The new package is aimed at fully understanding how your story spread and how you may adapt future story releases to take best advantage of Twitter and its amazing viral nature.
Earlier in the week we had a chat with Guy Kawasaki about integration of the TweetMeme content and button into AllTop and as a result TweetMeme is now on Alltop.com http://tweetmeme.alltop.com/.
As you may have already noticed Alltop is a great new way to read all our different feeds and in terms of our content it takes the top stories and aggregates them to give you a quick and simple view of what we have on our site. Feel free to take a peak and let us and Guy know what you think.
Our thanks on this one to @guykawasaki and his team for getting it all sorted out it looks great and we look forward to seeing what happens next with it.
Today we updated the TweetMeme site with some new features and some UI changes. We are hoping that this will help you find your way around the site easier and quicker as well as find additional information on re-tweets around your stories.
So first of all we added the Follow on Twitter link. This gives users the ability to follow a specific channel or the top level TweetMeme accoount. You’ll find the Follow next to our Subscribe button and under the Sign in area on the top right of the page.
Secondly we’ve made it easier to find our channels on TweetMeme. So now you can find our channels in our sub menu next to the Live button, as well as down the right hand side of our site showing the top channels on TweetMeme.
We have a variety of different channels that may be of interest to our readers including the recently added World Wide Developer Conference Channel and the Le Mans racing channel amongst others.
And finally we’ve done an update on our TweetMeme button. The basics of the button remain the same, it still does the re-tweets via the re-tweet section of the button, but now we’ve also linked the top part of the button to the story page on TweetMeme relating to that story. This means that people can see the most recent re-tweets from people and the trending graph of re-tweets for that story.
We hope you like the updates and if you find any bugs or have any suggestions relating to these new features then please let us know over on our forum.
So that you can follow the latest news and announcements coming out of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference we’ve set up a TweetMeme channel for the event. The rumours have already started and people are making their predictions on what is being announced. You’ll also find the links to the big news sites live blogging the details as they are announced.
Also if you’re on the go or prefer getting your updates via twitter, we’ve also created a twitter account just for the announcements so that you don’t miss the important news.
To co-incide with this week’s fun, cool and exciting E3 Gaming event over in Los Angeles, California we’ve launched the E3 TweetMeme channel. Here you will find the top stories coming out of the event.
The channel seems to be filling quickly with great content on the Gaming industry with lots of pictures, some really big announcements and lots of fun bits of information. It’s a must for those of you into your gaming.
I’m also putting together a list of other fun events to cover during the course of the year, so if you know of a really fun or cool event that you think we should be creating a channel for then let us know and I’ll see about creating it!
To co-incide with this weekend’s fun, cool and exciting Maker Faire over in Bay Area, California we’ve launched the Maker Faire TweetMeme channel. Here you will find the top stories coming out of the event.
I’m expecting to see some of the coolest crafts and hacks seen in a long time in this stream. It’s one of the most interesting inventor events (and if that’s not a bit of a tongue twister then I don’t know what is!) that I know of. If you know of any other really interesting ones then do let me know. I’m always interested to hear about them!
Personally I’m wondering when they’ll bring the Maker Faire over to the UK and Europe. I suspect that it would go down really well over this way. After all there’s a mad inventor in all of us. All you need to do is watch Dragon’s Den to find that out!
I’m also putting together a list of other fun events to cover during the course of the year, so if you know of a really fun or cool event that you think we should be creating a channel for then let us know and I’ll see about creating it!
Today we launched a shiny new feature called the TweetMeme Bar. And I’m betting that you want to know what it does, how it does it and so on! Well here’s the basic info… and when I manage to get Daniel in front of the video camera then I’ll also pop up a video of him going through all the cool ins and outs of the bar with you! For now however you’ll have to cope with my geeky descriptions of it all!
As you can see from the image above (you’ll need to click on it to see it properly though) going from left to right… We have our logo, then the re-tweet button including the number of times the link has been retweeted the name of the link text and then the information view options of All, News, Images or Video’s. Hit the re-tweet button and we’ll re-tweet the url that you are on. Hit home and we take you back home to our site… or if you’re curious and just want to browse to any random re-tweet site then hit the shuffle button and off you go!
The Shuffle button opens up a bar above stories and allows you to ’shuffle’ through stories that TweetMeme has found, this is gives you a unparalleled resource of interesting content. TweetMeme aggregates 200,000+ new links/stories/video/images every day and you have access to all of them. Just like the main site the bar lets you filter down by category and by the media type so you can discover things of interest to you.
We are very aware that some users do not like ‘framing’ of content and although the bar is ‘opt-out’ the first time you close the bar it prompts you immediately if you no longer wish to have the bar. It is also one click away on our settings pop-up to turn it on and off.
We think the logged in experience and tweetmeme bar make fantastic partners as you can shuffle through content and retweet what you like without leaving the page
We’re really excited about the TweetMeme bar and we do hope you like it. We’re finding it really fun when browsing websites to find what sites have our re-tweet button on it.
With the Next 09 Conference starting out today and continuing through to tomorrow we’ve added a TweetMeme feed showing the news and pictures coming out of the site. The links so far are looking interesting and I’m sure they will continue to fly in and make for some really interesting reading for anyone who’s looking to what’s going to be the next big thing on the web.
You can follow the channel here.
If you want us to follow your event or want a custom channel then do let us know by contacting us on twitter!
