Twitter finally launched it’s official “tweet” button. As you can see below, it comes in 3 different sizes.

URL: http://twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton

Latest study by HP Labs suggests that “The correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.”

That means it’s the retweets that really matter, and if you are a social networking advertiser you might want to find out the retweet rates of your twitter users that you are advertising on. Otherwise, if no one retweets their tweets, you might be wasting your money.

Because the research suggests that there are users with: 1) many followers and low relative infuence, and 2) users with fewer followers but high relative infuence. If you were to choose one of two, you should go for the second type of users. Because that way your message will be heard by a lot more people.

As we know twitter is like a river, at any given time you can only see the latest tweets and everything else is a history… So unless your “message” is retweeted, it’s as good as it’s dead.

I am just rumbling here, but I hope you know what I am getting at. Here is the research:

Influence and Passivity in Social Media – HP Labs Research