Twitter Offers Own Retweet Button

12 August, 2010 - 09:22 AM - 24 Comments

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:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-url=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” data-text=

“<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>” data-count=”vertical” data-via=”DragonBlogger”>Tweet</a>

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script>

Update 2

Andy Beard makes some compelling reasons why not to use the Twitter Retweet button in your blog posts and this article contains some information I did not have at the time of writing this post. Such as the Twitter Retweet button by default being “dofollow” and can suck pagerank from your blog posts, in addition to accuracy on link tracking. A highly suggested read!

-Dragon Blogger

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Written by Justin Germino (1518 Articles Published)

Working in the IT Industry for over 10 years and specializing in web based technologies. Dragon Blogger has unique insights and opinions to how the internet and web technology works. An Avid movie fan, video game fan and fan of trying anything and everything new.

Follow Justin Germino on Twitter @dragonblogger

Udegbunam Chukwudi

The link to Andy's article links to his front page and not the article itself :-(

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Lauren

This is where I get lost Justin. Why would I use a button that leaks my pagerank, and in turn, Twitter gives me nothing in return. What are the benefits for my site?

dragonblogger

Well, I manually added the nofollow which should reduce the pagerank hemorrhage, but you make a perfectly good point and one Twitter should start to consider if they want to be the "Defacto" retweet button.

Mashable didn't have a problem converting to the new official Twitter Retweet button as did many other major sites. I tend to follow what the giant players do in the industry when it comes to socialized buttons.

Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing

I'm a little confused by the different updates, are you still recommending the switch?

It seems faster, but there are no analytics for T.co links yet, unlike Bit.ly. I did the switch to stay on the cutting edge and do the post, and let it soak but at this time I don't recommend switching from Topsy or Tweetmeme with Bit.ly.

Well now, this explains my confusion of the new tweet button I've seen everywhere today, thanks!

I hope it works 100% better then the retweet button in individual twitter accounts, which doesn't seem to work at all.

Dean Saliba

They had to produce one eventually. It does look nice and clean but for the time being I'm happy to keep with TweetMeme. :)

TrafficColeman

Its about time twitter take control of its own tweets. Maybe this will benefit use twitters more by having something coming directly from the source..Its been an long time coming..but its finally here.

I'm bout to test it out now my friends..
Thanks Dragon

"TrafficColeman "Signing Off"

Josiah @ Making a Living Online

This really neat. It seems like it would be more accurate than tweetmeme, although tweetmeme rarely missed a retweet.

After reading this i decided to write about it, i found an easy fix to the homepage issue. Here is the post:

http://josiahstaggs.com/post/948255270/add-twitter...

Udegbunam Chukwudi@Make Money Online

@Josiah: Tried commenting on your blog was disqus was taking forever to load. Thanks for the tip man. Works on my blog ;-)

Made the switch yesterday and boy am I glad that it recognizes previous retweets done via tweetmeme ;-)

BlazingMinds

It does look great, but maybe it's just me, but I still love the Topsy button that I use, maybe with a bit more development on Twitters side I might consider using it myself ;)

Aj@WordPress Themes

Wow. It is about time. I have always wondered why they never offered their own button. Its great news and hopefully it loads a bit faster then the tweetmeme button. Thanks for keeping me up to date ;)

Yep, so far it works, waiting to see if an analytics program exists where I can track statistics from the t.co links though.

DiTesco

Looks good. I just tested the button and it realized automatically the post. Does this mean that you were able to solve the problem? Anyway, we'll see how the development of this new feature will go.

This is why I defaulted to Tweetmeme back on homepage and use Twitter button on single posts.

Wayne Howard

I've just started using the official tweet button and I must say that I like it a lot. I like how it suggests people to follow after you are done and you don't have to leave the page. Makes the user experience a little friendlier and that's always a good thing.

I agree and think that is a nice extra feature.

Laura@Banking Rates

Looks great. I can understand why Twitter would do that. Its better business strategy for them, and now its "official."

Don Power - Marketing Consultant | Social Media Ma

Hey Dragonblogger! I like the look of this new button. I used it to tweet a link to this post! Let's see if it worked!

Cheers - and thanks for the heads up!

- Don

It worked well and shows the updated count. One thing is it won't show updated if you tweet your own post from your own account. I tested that on another post, Tweetmeme will increment if you tweet yourself, but Twitter retweet button won't. I kind of like that.

John Paul@Make Money With A Blog

haha I have this tweet going out in an hour..lol

This is cool. I wonder if it will work better then TweetMeme.

Would be nice to track RTs in house on Twitter.

So far, without someone custom coding the retweet button, it won't work on your index.php for retweeting articles only homepage. It just needs some time for developers to start making button variations, styles and official wordpress plugins. Then the major sites need to do analytics for it. Hootsuite needs to immediately switch and support tracking for t.co links I think.