To help expand my ReTweeting research, please take my new survey and encourage your followers to do the same.

My research has shown that the number of followers exposed to a Tweet has only a weak correlation to the number of ReTweets it gets, indicating that the content of the tweet may be more important than the user posting it. To begin to understand the key characteristics of highly-ReTweetable content I took a look at the top 10,000 (out of over 158,000 total) most ReTweeted tweets in my ReTweet Mapping database.

I broke down the most common words and phrases in these highly ReTweeted posts and cherry picked through the list (ignoring very common words) to uncover what I think are 20 of the most ReTweetable words and phrases. Browsing through the list below should give you a pretty good idea of what kind of content gets ReTweeted the most.

Some highlights from the list:

The word “you” while very common, seems to occur especially often in ReTweets, indicating that if you’re talking to “me” I’m more likely to ReTweet it.

Its really not surprising that “Twitter” ranks high, but this is a good reminder that self-reference is always good for buzz in social media.

Again we see “please” and “please ReTweet” (“please rt” also ranked highly). I’ve written about this a few times, but its hard to overstate how important it is to ask for the ReTweet when you want it, calls to action work.

The word “free” seems to remind is to provide value, especially value at no cost to our readers, as does the word help.

The occurrence of the word “help” could indicate either a tweet that promises to help you or a request for help. Whichever it is, it reinforces both providing value and calls to action.

“Social Media” as a phrase ranks high, so again, don’t be afraid to tweet about tweeting, blogging, networking, digging, etc.

The number “10” made a surprise appearance high on the list. Top 10s are popular, always have been and always will be, don’t forget it. The word “top” also made an appearance on the list.

“New Blog Post” is the common prefix used when a person tweets about, well, a new blog post to their site. That this ranks so highly tells us that tweeting your posts is a very smart thing to do.

Occurrences	Word or Phrase
1364	you
1138	twitter
701	please
598	retweet
397	post
389	blog
352	social
306	free
304	media
269	help
262	please retweet
262	great
237	social media
229	10
222	follow
187	how to
165	top
164	blog post
128	check out
118	new blog post

The last few weeks have been kind of hectic for me, so its taken me longer than I’d wanted to update TweetSuite, but I’ve uploaded a new version with some bugfixes and a few new features.

If you’re using and like TweetSuite, please consider voting for me in the Shorty Awards.

The fixes include:

• AutoTweeting only on New Posts
• Max TweetBacks to display works now
• TweetBacks retrieval was optimized and made much faster

And the new features include:

• Ability to add a prefix to AutoTweets
• A function that allows you to place the Tweet-This button anywhere in your template (inside the WP loop)

The Tweet-This button will appear wherever you place this code:

<?php tweetsuite_tweetthis_button(); ?>

Again, this is still pretty beta stuff and there are a few more issues I have to work out before I consider this to be verion 1.0, so please, bear with me. I also intend to work on better documentation for the next version.

Download the updated version here.

Since launching my implementation of TweetBacks a few days ago, the response has been much larger than I expected (in fact Twitter CEO Evan Williams remarked that he had just drawn TweetBacks on the Twitter whiteboard a few weeks ago), and the guys at MediaTemple have been great in working with me to help scale the server to meet the demand.

Remember that this is still beta, and the first time you view a page that has TweetBacks installed on it, the script will take a moment to load, subsequent views of the page will be fast. If you’ve installed TweetBacks on your blog, please leave your URL in a comment. I’d love to see how it looks out in the wild.

To install, just copy and paste this JavaScript into your template/theme where you want your TweetBacks to appear:

<script src="http://danzarrella.com/tb.js?stats=true"></script>

I’ve just released a TweetBacks WordPress Plugin.

I’ve been listening to what people have said about TweetBacks and have implemented a few new features in response to the great feedback I’ve gotten.

First up are the 6 new configuration options I’ve added, allowing users to customize how TweetBacks are displayed on their blogs.

New Configuration Options:

1. Option to display only the number of TweetBacks (countonly=true)
2. Option to limit the max number of TweetBacks shown (max=10)
3. Option to hide user avatars (noavatars=true)
4. Ability to hide TweetBacks from certain users (blockedusers=user1+user2)
5. Switch to turn off all styling other than avatar (nostyle=true)
6. Switch to turn off the title (notitle=true)

You can use these configuration options by including them in the URL you use to call my TweetBacks javascript in your template like this (they can go in any order and you block as many users as you want):

<script src="http://danzarrella.com/tb.js?noavatars=true&countonly=true&max=10&blockedusers=user1+user2&nostyle=true&notitle=true&stats=true"></script>

TweetStats (statistics about TweetBacks of your content).

Additionally, I began building a system to report stats on TweetBacks. The first feature is a list of the most Tweeted posts on your site (you can see it in action in my side bar under “Most Tweeted”), it works like this:

<script src="http://danzarrella.com/tsjs.php?max=5"></script>

Just copy and paste that code into the sidebar of your template. You can change the styling of the list is displays via CSS:

div#mostTweeted {
font-size:12px;
}

In order to take advantage of this, you have to turn on the “stats” feature in TweetBacks by appending stats=true to your TweetBack script as seen above. By default the sidebar script will use the contents of the page’s <title> tag as the link text, but you can customize this by proving the TweetBack script with a title parameter. WordPress users can easily use code like this:

<script src="http://danzarrella.com/tb.js?noavatars=true&countonly=true&max=10&blockedusers=user1+user2&stats=true&title=<?php urlencode(the_title()); ?>"></script>

This script has one option so far: the maximum number of posts to show. By default it will show 5.

I also added and changed a few things users had requested, as well as fixed a couple of bugs that had been affecting some sites:

Changes & Additions:

• Removed the link to the specific tweet’s URL
• Added the date the tweet was posted on
• Added support for tr.im

Bug Fixes:

• Total TweetBacks number matches actual number of tweets
• is.gd and bit.ly support is now functional

Future plans include integration with my ReTweet mapping system. Over 70% of all ReTweets contain a link, meaning the majority of them are actually TweetBacks. By using my TweetBacks script, you’ll be able to track (and map) the spread of your content through Twitter through normal TweetBacks as well as ReTweets.

Update: I’ve released a TweetBacks WordPress Plugin that includes TweetBacks as a feature.

In response to a Mashable post about how Twitter will change blog design in 2009, yesterday I created Tweetbacks.

They work kind of like trackbacks, but instead of listing blogs linking to a specific post, it lists Tweets about a specific post. You can see it in action on my blog, just above the comments. It currently finds mentions of the URL through the top 5 most popular URL shorteners on Twitter: Tinyurl, Bit.ly, Is.gd, Twurl, and SnipURL. I used cli.gs’s list of top shorteners to prioritize. To prevent it from running afoul of Twitter’s search API rate limits it functions via javascript.

This is still in beta, but to install it all you have to do is include this line in your template where you want the Tweetbacks to appear:

<script src="http://danzarrella.com/tb.js"></script>

You can style how the list appears with CSS like this:

#tweetbacks {
font-size:12px;
}
#tweetbacks li {
padding-bottom:5px;
}

This tool (as well as my ReTweet mapper) are currently free, but they do use bandwidth and server processing time that I pay for. If you like my Tweetbacks tool, my ReTweet tools or the other work I do, consider donating to help pay for it: