Twitter now officially released its own Retweet button that you can put on your websites and Tweetmeme is standing behind it.  In fact, according to TechCrunch article Tweetmeme is shifting its business model and services to sifting information and it may eventually migrate away from the Tweetmeme retweet button.  Twitter licensed some technology from Tweetmeme for the retweet button.  This comes along with I just read in Website Magazine that Twitter is working on its own URL compression that will compress any and all URL’s going through Twitter service.  This would effectively make Bit.ly and other URL shrinking services near useless if Twitter is doing this.

See demonstration of the new Twitter Retweet button, and you can see the article on Twitter blog to install the button on your site.

DragonBlogger.com now uses the official Twitter retweet button in lieu of this news.

You just pick up your code, choose your button style and set which Twitter account gets notified on every retweet:

What I really like is that you can set a 2nd account to be notified on every retweet, this is a feature that Tweetmeme didn’t have by default unless you modified the code manually.

By the way, after testing I confirmed that all URL’s are shrunk with t.co shrinking service which is Twitters URL shrinking and not Bit.ly.  The bad news is that I don’t know of any services that can track analytics for t.co shrunk URL’s at this time and Bit.Ly had awesome link tracking.  So I am keeping this button on anticipating that some company will have t.co link tracking and decoding within the next week or so.

Who is switching to the new Twitter Retweet button?

Update:

The new official Twitter retweet button doesn’t realize from our Index.php which post you are trying to retweet and if you put the code in your Index.php will only retweet your homepage instead of the article you were trying to retweet.  Tweetmeme will know which article you are clicking the Retweet button from, this is why I have failed back to Tweetmeme for the homepage Retweet button but will continue to test the Twitter retweet button from the single.php.

I have to thank Josiah Staggs for writing an article with code example on how to solve the index.php issue that I encountered.  He listed the code to put in the index.php that would set the proper URL when you tweet.  I modified it one step further and now this code below if you put in your index.php will display the article “title” with the article URL in the tweet message:

Update 2

-Dragon Blogger

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I have really enjoyed using the MyLikes service to earn a little extra money from my Twitter and Facebook accounts. MyLikes alone earns me only about $12 dollars per month or so but considering how little effort and time it takes to create a sponsored like, this is a high Return on Investment (ROI). MyLikes is just one of the many programs that I have tried throughout the years to make money online and it is one of the best for earning on Social Media sites in my opinion.

I finally for the first time broke 1,000 points on MyLikes and have been a Black Ninja for quite a bit. The one thing that baffles me is that I have had 50 people referred to MyLikes from my own account, yet I only earned 1 $4 referral earning and it should have been about $200 total so far. In reading MyLikes referral earnings:

Referral payouts will be credited as soon as your qualified referral connects their Twitter account to MyLikes, completes the Influencer signup, and creates a Sponsored Like.

So the people who are joining MyLikes under my links must be signing up and not even taking one of the SponsoredLikes for a spin. If you have a prolific Twitter account, take MyLikes for a spin and see how much spare change you can pick up from it. You just may earn enough to pay your monthly web hosting fee’s or buy yourself a few fast food meals a month. Of course, if you have a very active and wide reaching Twitter and Facebook accounts you can likely find yourself earning more than a $100 per month pretty easily.

On Average I see sponsored likes paying about 14 CPC, which is higher than most of the sponsored CPC opps on SponsoredTweets. But you can find some as high as .41 CPC and even a few on occasion for more than 60 CPC which can earn you some pretty good change pretty quick. 100 clicks at .60 CPC = $60.00 not bad from one tweet.

The cool thing about MyLikes is that you can set a sponsored liked to repeatedly tweet for up to 4 days in a row (set it and forget it). The bad news is that the advertiser can pull the like or adjust the CPC on you before your campaign ends and you can get stiffed, so I recommend only sending 1 sponsored like at a time and not using the “auto send for next X days” feature. (Just a personal preference, because the opp can be cancelled and you won’t notice).

I have seen MyLikes also experiment with PayPerAction likes where you get a set dollar amount per sign up, I have only seen one so far and not sure how it works as I didn’t sign up for it. Because they require a sign up (conversion) they pay a bit higher but probably have a lower conversion rate. It will be interesting to see how prominent and prolific the PayPerAction likes become. Also, I have set my Video Cost but have yet to see or hear about anybody hired to do a YouTube Video promotion for a product on MyLikes yet, if you know someone who has let me know how it worked out.

One of the benefits touted for Black Ninja status was supposed to be preference in contests as well as featured likes (which I do see) but I haven’t seen any contests since June and think that the contest portion of MyLikes may have been temporarily put on hold. I emailed the MyLikes team about the contests but never heard back from them yet.

I recommend MyLikes and combined with SponsoredTweets I generally make about $25 just from my Twitter account of about 5500 followers, if I had 10x this many followers I probably could make over $200 per month with my Twitter account.

Sign up for MyLikes under me and remember to link your Twitter account and test a Sponsored Like if you would.

-Dragon Blogger

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So I was directed to and read the article Twitter Reply Made Easy by @goldenTwine who reached out to me on Twitter (even was so kind as to include my FollowFriday Tutorial Video inside his post).  He mentioned in his article something that affected me on a daily basis and I didn’t know before.  If you reply to multiple people on Twitter in the same message and you start your message off with an @ symbol, then only the 1st person mention will show the tweet in their “home feed” while the others will only see the reply in their replies/mentions column.

“@Ileane @BlazingMinds @rockalong Can you See this Tweet”

For example would show up in all 3 users “Mention” column, but only Ileane would see the tweet in her home page on Twitter or her “All Friends” column on Tweetdeck.  While this may not be a big deal, it is to people who are following that users account and this may decrease the number of users who see your tweet if you are replying to multiple twitter followers in this method which I have been doing for eighteen months.

To properly get the tweet to show up in the home field you must make sure not to start a tweet with an @reply and have some valid message first and then include the people you want to reply to.  The same goes for FollowFriday tweets, you should start the Tweet off with a message and not a list of @reply with a #FollowFriday at the end of the message.

You can find more information about tweeting on Twitter from the same article and I would like to thank Subrato Paul for showing me something new on Twitter that will cause me to modify my own tweeting habits.

-Dragon Blogger

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Okay, the new Hootsuite HTML5 isn’t that new anymore since it was updated a few weeks ago and has already been seen by hundreds of thousands of people, but I did my own video to showcase the new look and feel of Hootsuite which I felt was only right since my previous videos all had the old Hootsuite version in them.

What I like about the new Hootsuite HTML 5

• The interface is clean, visually appealing
• I can make the color scheme so that it looks almost like Tweetdeck (black and white letters)
• The “separator” between old messages and new updates is fantastic for showing the split between where new updates are and the stuff you already read
• Adding Google Analytics gives you even better click tracking and analytics for your tweets if you use Ow.ly or Ht.ly to shrink them

The not so good things about the new HTML 5 Hootsuite

• Scheduling tweets takes longer than old interface before due to the extra click and steps involved
• Hootsuite interface is slower on FireFox than old interface due to advanced HTML 5 features

Read more…

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