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.

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!

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!

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.

Sarah Blow, the TweetMeme Community Manager, and myself, will be attending the event to talk all thing TweetMeme and will also be taking the opportunity to show off the new TweetMeme Analytics

If you are interested in social media, marketing and/or PR, this is an event that is not worth missing! Head over to Social Media 09 to sign-up now!  And if you’re a start up, sole trader or charity then please go here!

What’s more, mention that you heard about Social Media 09 through TweetMeme, and get 20% off your ticket!!

We realise that the positioning of the Gadget in the Sidebar isn’t ideal, as many would prefer it inline with their posts, so to overcome this you can use our new tool to insert the button directly into your blog template. The editor is also good news for bloggers using “Classic” templates to whom gadgets aren’t available.

To get your template code for editing, simply go to Layout then Edit HTML in your dashboard, and copy your complete template from within the textarea ([Ctrl+A] then [Ctrl+C] works well). If you are using advanced templates, please ensure the Expand Widget Templates box is ticked, though our editor will tell you if you forgot!

Once you’ve found and copied your template code you can start using the TweetMeme Blogger Template Editor.

With the addition of the editor, we’ve decided to bundle Blogger support in to a new Blogger menu page from which you can find the Gadget, the Template Editor, and a guide for manual editing.

Hot on the heels of the TypePad Widget we now bring you a Blogger Gadget.  This is a simple way to add the TweetMeme retweet button to your blog and place the button where you want it on your blog page without the need for editing your templates, all using the native Page Elements interface.

To get started just make your way over to the How to add the TweetMeme Gadget to Blogger page and follow the steps.

Unfortunately TypePad’s API only allows widgets to be added to those blogs using Drag-and-Drop Design Templates so if you are using Advanced Templates you will, for the moment at least, need to continue using the manual insert method described in our help page How to Add a TweetMeme Button to your TypePad Blog.

Head over to the TweetMeme TypePad Widget page to customise your button and get it added to your blog!
By default, the widget will be installed at the bottom of your side-bar but you are free to re-organise if you wish through the Organize Content section of your Design tab.

Support for many more sites is on the way.

Before I go on and show you how this will work and what it will look like please note that this functionality has not yet been put live and a such the images shown below may look slightly different to the final version but with no significant changes to the basic functionality.

We will have two different variants of our button. One for on our TweetMeme website, which we call our internal button. And one for on external websites. I explain this first because I don’t want anyone getting confused that they act very slightly differently.

The TweetMeme Button on the TweetMeme site

The image above is what you will see when you try to connect to TweetMeme for the first time. It is basically setting you up to connect us to TweetMeme using Twitter’s Oauth access. It will take you to Twitter and ask you to log in just like in the image below. It’s a bit like Facebook connect really but for Twitter.

Once you’ve done this you’ll then be able to re-tweet any content from our site by pressing the green part of our TweetMeme button without having to log into TweetMeme if you are already logged into Twitter. Instead you’ll just get an image like the one below! Note that you can now edit the content of the message to whatever you choose. What you cannot do is remove or replace the URL with a different one. This is to ensure that the content sent does really relate back to the original source. After all we wouldn’t want it to misguide people.

Now for on your own site!

External TweetMeme Buttons!

To ensure consistency and simplicity we use a very similar system to the internal one. So for the first time you log into the TweetMeme button you will see the following:

Once again it connects with Twitter just like Facebook connect for the first time. If you aren’t logged into Twitter you’ll be asked to log in as usual and then get passed back to the button. Where you can edit the content (excluding the URL) and read even more interesting content on the site. We don’t take you away from the site that you are reading to update your users.

If at any point you don’t like or want this functionality you can always log into TweetMeme and change your preferences so that all buttons act as they currently do with no content editing for your account and automatic retweeting of content when you press then button and are logged in. If for any reason you say no the the initial connection on an external site we will automatically revert back to the original log in and allow manual tweeting & editing of your tweet on your own Twitter account on Twitter.

We hope you enjoy the new functionality and if you are press and would like to find out more about the button or require additional information please don’t hesitate to get in contact.

The TweetMeme Analytics enables report generation for any story on Twitter. Our reports help to analyze the spread of content on Twitter, and provide data on the tweets, retweets, clicks, domains, users and locations with the ability to export this information. Companies, brands and agencies are under increasing pressure to provide proof of ROIs when it comes to social media. What our Analytics provide is a way to compare your campaigns with competitor campaigns, and to help improve strategies for future campaigns.

So if you would like to monitor the performance of the content on your blog/website, know how far your content has spread virally through Twitter and which path it took, then the TweetMeme Analytics are for you!

Sign-up is EASY and involves 2 simple steps!

Step 1. On Twitter? Sign-in to our Analytics pages.
Step 2. Get started- Generate your first report!

What’s more TweetMeme is offering the first month completely FREE. This means you will be able to generate unlimited reports across all stories on one domain for FREE!

We have  also added updates to our Wordpress Plugin. This is now integrated with our analytics, which means you can take advantage of our FREE trial directly from the plugin, as well as being able to access basic analytics for any story served by the retweet button.

Coverage -

• TechCrunch – “TweetMeme Adds Analytics to Make Sense of Twitter Links”

• Mashable – “TweetMeme Analytics Show You How Retweets Spread on Twitter”