Tweetmeme is one of the most popular and smartest Twiiter-based services. It’s well-known “Retweet it” buttons are used throughout the Internet. So today we are featuring the interview with TweetMeme’s Community Manager, Sarah Blow.
How could I introduce you personally? What’s your role in the company?
I’m Sarah Blow, the Community Manager here at TweetMeme. It is my job to support our user base, work with our users to improve our product and to support our developers when they need more information on our users needs when they are developing new features. I blog over on our TweetMeme Blog (Follow them on Twitter).
We’ve heard about TweetMeme quite a lot and seems like it’s a large company? But how big is it actually? How many employees? Who’s behind TweetMeme?
TweetMeme is a little company with big ambitions. The current family consists of a team of 10 employees and our elustrious leader is Nick Halstead who is the brain child behind TweetMeme.
How and when was it all started? How was the idea born? Who was behind the actual idea of the Twitter-powered meme tracker?
TweetMeme was originally created as a promotional site to see what we could do with Twitter, we then left it for a good 6 months and then re-designed and re-developed it it towards the beginning of this year and did a re-launch with categorization of content, the button and widgets. Then later we added search.
Tweetmeme buttons are used by very powerful blogs including Mashable and TechCrunch. What was the first powerful blog(s) to use it?
I think the biggest one that adopted our button across the entire site initially was actually TechCrunch but Mashable was the first big site to start using it although only across a few of their writers.
Are there any other Twitter-related projects your company manages (plans to manage)?
We do also have TweetTabs, which allows for multi tabbed search which you can find here: http://tweettabs.com . This was a project that was initially thought of and created by Daniel who is our JavaScript Guru! It comes in really handy when you want to monitor lots of different searches in one screen.
Besides Twitter, how do you promote (or used to promote) Tweetmeme to get the word out?
Our buttons do a lot of our promotion on our behalf especially initially when they used to tweet out via @tweetmeme but these days it’s more a case of word of mouth, press media coverage both new and traditional as well as making sure we are easy to find when you search on Google and other search engines for relevant content.
What’s the future of Tweetmeme? What do you plan it to develop into?
The future of TweetMeme is very bright, we have lots of work going on behind the scenes, we recently released the updated WordPress Plugin with graphing functionality and analysis for blog posts. I couldn’t say what we have as work in progress as we love to surprise our users with great new features and relevant and interesting content. One thing that we are working on is our spam filter though as there is a lot more spam and explicit content coming out of Twitter than ever before.
How is Tweetmeme monetized? Could you describe how sponsorship works?
TweetMeme has a range of services for users to further enhance their reach on twitter. The first is the Featured Tweet where companies can sponsor a tweet and it gets featured on our front page for a period of time. It must however be interesting and relevant content to our readers though otherwise it drops from the front page. It gives the sponsor the opportunity to engage with a really large audience and if it’s relevant then it will get re-tweeted and spread the word.
We also have standard tenancy advertising slots on our site on all categories as well as our front page. And last but definitely not least we have the ability to create custom channels on any subject and can style them and allow users to host these themselves for a period of time.
