HUBSPOT INBOUND INTERNET MARKETING BLOG — We all know content that spreads helps attract more people to your business, and a major way that content spreads on Twitter is through ReTweets (learn more about ReTweets on this free webinar). Here are a number of things you can do to have the best chance of getting the most ReTweets...

NEW YORK TIMES — Conan O’Brien has almost sold out his nationwide comedy tour -- and all it took was a few Twitter messages. It was an experiment of sorts for Mr. O’Brien’s team -- and they quickly found out how loyal the comedian’s online fan base can be. "It was expertly done," said Geof Wills, the president of Live Nation Comedy, who said he was astonished to see how successful the untraditional communications approach was in selling thousands of tickets. The O’Brien team relied on no traditional advertising, just the Twitter messages to his 600,000-plus followers...

SOCIAL MEDIA B2B — Today at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas, Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, announced a new ad program for Twitter. These new ads are called @Anywhere. When you find a reference of a Twitter account, you can roll over the link and bring up a Twitter card. It shows if you are following the account or not, recent tweets and other details about the account. You can also follow the account directly from the card. This tool lets you interact with Twitter from the site, without ever going to Twitter.com. You can also sign in to the site using Twitter more easily than ever before. The platform is launching on a limited number of sites like ebay, Yahoo and Digg. B2B companies are using Twitter to build networks of followers and ultimately generate leads for new business, and this new @Anywhere approach is a way to build those networks and make sure the followers are relevant...

E-CONSULTANCY.COM — In March the UK’s Daily Telegraph reported that 700,000 businesses in the UK had active accounts. and across the blogosphere and in company boardrooms the platform is being breathlessly talked up as the future of online customer communication. But, hyperbole aside, how well does Twitter work as a channel for reaching customers and generating sales? With one or two exceptions (most notably Dell, which has claimed several million dollars in revenue from Twitter), few businesses have used Twitter to drive significant sales. Studying the Twitter profiles of some major UK online retailers and analysing available data suggests that, as far as business is concerned,Twitter is yet to live up to its hype...

THE GUARDIAN — Twitter's growth seems to have lost its momentum, according to a new study. Growth in the micro-blogging service's number of users peaked at nearly 20% last April, but had dropped down to 0.15% in December 2009, says a study by Barracuda Networks. Recent web analytics had already suggested that Twitter had reached its peak, as Twitter.com recorded a traffic high in July 2009 and has never reached that level since. According to Compete, Twitter reached 23.5 million users in August 2009 and stayed put. However, as Twitter client applications have grown and have become a bigger percentage of Twitter's user base, the numbers didn't necessarily reflect the actual situation of the micro-blogging service. By using the growth in Twitter users, instead of the site's traffic, the Barracuda study now puts things into perspective...