Jul 6th Tweetcount Widget & Plugin

Today, we added a new offering for publishers: a WordPress plugin and widget called Tweetcount. Tweetcount allows you to display the number of tweets your posts receive, and lets readers retweet the page they’re on. We wanted a button for our blog and decided we’d be happier creating one ourselves. It’s running on this blog in “small” mode.

Tweetcount has a couple of advantages over Tweetmeme’s button:

Awe.sm Integration & Analytics

Our plugin and widget both allow you to specify your own awe.sm-powered URL shortener for links in retweets. Not only does that let you “brand” your links, but it also gives you access to full clickstream data and the ability to pull stats into Google Analytics automagically with GA Tracking Parameters.

Tweetcount defaults to our own awe.sm-powered shortener, bt.io :)

Customization

Specifying the button’s colors is the first of many features that will allow you to customize the button. More generally, we’ll be very flexible with attribution, linking and customization, starting with button colors and the tweets your readers send out.

Check out our other plugins and widgets

Tags: , , , ,

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Widgets, plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

14 Tweets 35 Other Comments

31 Responses to “Tweetcount Widget & Plugin”

Malcolm Bastien says:
Jul 6th at 2:34 pm

Awesome idea. The button looks slick. It doesn’t work!

cg says:
Jul 6th at 2:43 pm

Where did you try it? We’ll look into it.

cg says:
Jul 6th at 3:08 pm

Issue w/ the button is now fixed. Thanks for pointing it out!

imath says:
Jul 6th at 2:37 pm

Very interesting, i’ll give it a try! thank you for this work and for your comments tracking service ;)

imath says:
Jul 6th at 2:39 pm

Yep Malcolm is right it doesn’t work guys it opens twitter.com with this url : http://twitter.com/038;%20Plugin%20http%3A%2F%2Fbt.io%2FGg%20%28via%20@backtype%29

cg says:
Jul 6th at 2:43 pm

Where did you put the widget when you had issues?

Foolish Sage says:
Jul 6th at 2:51 pm

The issue is with the widget right here on this blog post.

Foolish Sage says:
Jul 6th at 2:52 pm

Looks to me like the ampersand in the post title might have killed it.

cg says:
Jul 6th at 2:53 pm

@Foolish Sage: That’s right — fixing it now :P

cg says:
Jul 6th at 3:07 pm

Fixed. Sorry about that!

Foolish Sage says:
Jul 6th at 3:19 pm

Works great now, thanks! Can’t wait to get home tonight. This is definitely replacing TweetMeme’s button on my blog.

Foolish Sage says:
Jul 6th at 2:50 pm

CG: They’re talking about using the widget on this here blog post. It opens up Twitter with an incomplete headline and no linkback.

Jesse Stay says:
Jul 6th at 4:23 pm

Give me a widget that shows number of FriendFeed likes (and gives ability to like from the widget) and I’ll totally install it. Same with Facebook.

Patrick Curl says:
Jul 9th at 2:59 am

I’ve just added your TweetCount tool, but I’d like to make a suggestion to make it better – why not give the option to use other url shortening services with it. Especially Bitly. It would make your version way better than TweetMemes by far.

I’m waiting on an Awesm invite code, so I can’t use the API and tracking features. Bitly however is open and I have an account there so it would nice to be able to track the links via Bitly.

jonathan says:
Jul 9th at 11:54 am

Hey Patrick, sorry for the wait on the awe.sm invite. We’ve been overwhelmed by the interest in joining our private beta and want to make sure we can provide the best service possible to the folks we let in. Feel free to drop a line to support [at] awe.sm if you’d like to discuss further.

One thing to note is that the default bt.io shortener does feature Google Analytics integration. So even without an awe.sm API Key of your own, you will still be able to see how much traffic the Tweetcount plugin is driving in GA. While this won’t let you see the click count on individual links right now, I think the aggregate view of what visitors from Tweetcount links do on your site (via GA) is actually more interesting.

Christopher Golda says:
Jul 9th at 3:07 pm

Thanks for the feedback! We definitely want to add Bitly support — just didn’t finish it in time for this version. If you want to keep up to date with releases (Bitly will be in the next, for sure), follow our blog or Twitter account (@BackType).

Christopher Golda says:
Jul 15th at 3:14 am

FYI: We just added Bit.ly support in the 1.3 release :)

saud says:
Jul 13th at 12:45 am

I think there a problem in your plugin

every time i push retweet button ,twitter page this error massage “Twitter is over capacity”

second problem, our blog in Arabic language, the URL in the retweet button look like this
“http://twitter.com/home/?status=%u0623%u0636%u0641%20%u0623%u062F%u0627%u0629%20″%u0627%u0644%u0645%u0639%u062C%u0628%u064A%u0646″…%20http%3A%2F%2Fbt.io%2FuJ%20(via%20@backtype)”

Christopher Golda says:
Jul 15th at 3:14 am

Thanks for letting us know — we’re hoping to have this addressed in the next release.

Mike Montano says:
Jul 20th at 1:24 am

@saud give the plugin another try, it should work for your blog now.

Blur says:
Jul 24th at 2:38 am

On WP 2.8.2 I can’t change the shortener. Seems stuck on awe.sm (tried all the options). Bug or lock-in? :-)

http://create.awe.sm/url/share?target=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blur.se%2F2009%2F07%2F22%2Fny-design-pa-blurse%2F&share_type=twitter&create_type=backtype-tweetcount&api_key=XXXX_my_bit.ly_API_key_XXXX&destination=http://twitter.com/home/?status=RT+%40blursailing+Ny+design+p%C3%A5+blur.se%3F+AWESM_TARGET

Mike Montano says:
Jul 24th at 2:43 am

Which shortener are you trying to switch to? It’s possible that you either need an API key for the specified shortener, or that your server isn’t letting the plugin make an external request to shorten the URL. If you have any more details you can forward them to support [at] backtype [dot] com and I’ll look into it.

Blur says:
Jul 24th at 11:38 am

Tried all of them… Sent an email to support. Thx.

Andy Brudtkuhl says:
Jul 27th at 2:37 pm

We just switched over to use this instead of TweetMeme’s but are not seeing the GA tracking code appended to the URL. We are using the bit.ly API. Please advise! This is why we switched!

Christopher Golda says:
Jul 30th at 2:46 pm

I believe GA tracking is only available with awe.sm-powered URLs. If you use bt.io, you’ll get GA tracking. Bit.ly has its own tracking internal to its service; not sure if they facilitate tracking in GA.

Brian McDaniel says:
Aug 14th at 9:37 pm

I have been using your GREAT Tweetcount plugin for WordPress for several weeks without anything but success and joy! But today my latest post is not updating the count – it’s stuck at 0. After over 30 tweets of the post I updated it manually in the custom fields on the post so now it’s stuck at 36. I didn’t make any changes to the blog or configuration. Any ideas? The address of the post in question: http://bkmacdaddy.com/blog/10-people-i-follow-on-twitter-and-why-i-think-you-should-follow-them-too

Benjamin says:
Aug 22nd at 2:37 pm

Is it possible to ignore tweets from a specific Twitter account ?
Example : I’m using Twitterfeed which posts a tweet automatically when I post an article on the blog, thus the first comment is always the tweet from twitterfeed ! I have been deleted the comment everytime, but can you add the option to ignore the tweets from a specific account ?

Thanks a lot !

Christopher Golda says:
Aug 22nd at 4:23 pm

Unfortunately, you can’t do that with our plugin yet. We’ll definitely include it in the next release.

Thanks for your feedback

Adam says:
Aug 28th at 11:11 am

Has anyone found a way to apply css to the “retweet” portion of the button to allow for hover effects? As much as I prefer this button compared to TweetMeme, TweetMeme’s hover effect helps people not familiar with the button realize that it is, in fact a button.
This appears to be the relevant class for TweetCount: ‘div.backtype-tweetcount a:hover’. However, it seems that the CSS is being fed by tweecount’s servers, not locally by my own: ‘http://assets.backtype.com/css/widgets/tweetcount.v0.1.css’ Does anyone know a way to override that sheet locally?

Additional comments powered by BackType

Twitter Us

    Categories