Last week Twitter announced the creation of its Tweet Button, created to perform a similar function as the "Retweet Button," which allows users to efficiently share their favorite links through Twitter. However, the Retweet button was created by TweetMeme, a third party company. Twitter announced that it will be phasing out the Retweet button in favor of the new Tweet Button.

Publishers can go onto Twitter and customize the tweet button onto their own websites. Once the newspaper has added the button, readers can share their favorite news stories via Twitter without leaving the original Web page. Instead they click on the "tweet button" which opens a small Twitter box with the shortened link.

Previously, users had to manually shorten the link to fit within the character limit, so this new feature makes Twitter much more user friendly. After the user adds their tweet, the newspaper can offer suggestions of other accounts to follow. This allows for readers to follow different journalist and creates more traffic for news websites. The Tweet button also displays how many times a link is shared.

Twitter's decision to create the the Tweet button was largely in part to compete with Facebook's "Like" button. Newspapers are currently very pleased with the success of the "Like" button and have used Facebook as a method for increasing traffic. Twitter wants a piece of the action in the news industry, and is taking measures to promote its social media services specifically for news organizations. Also similar to Facebook, over time the tweet button shows the behaviors of the users such as what type of articles they tweet the most. Several influential sites are already using the tweet button, such as Sky News, CNN, The Huffington Post, and more.

Sources: Twitter, The Wall Street Journal, Journalism.co.uk