I’ve been experimenting for the last few weeks with a new Retweet button combination on both this blog and my other one and so far I think it’s proven to be the best one I’ve used to date.

I’m using a combination of two WordPress plugins to achieve this: Backtype Tweetcount and Su.pr WordPress Plugin.

Backtype, which has another plugin for robust social media commenting, has knocked it out of the park with their Tweetcount plugin; it’s one of the most customizable retweet button on the market today.

Your other option, of course, is Tweetmeme’s button and WordPress plugin which does a good job as well.

Not only can I stylize it the way I’d like it, I can obviously put it anywhere I want (manually) and choose a host of other options in terms of what shortening service I’d like to use, what I’d like to have as leading text, and more.

You can see that I’ve chosen the simply white version on ChurchCrunch and gave it a small orange feel on Human3rror. They have a large and small version to play with.

Check out the options and read more goodness after the jump:

What I picked was Su.pr as my shortener of choice, for a number of reasons:

1. I can host the URLs on my own blog. Previously I had been using the ?p= way of doing things and it was just getting a big ugly to look at. In addition, I still wanted to be able to have that brand name recognition in the link. I’ve outlined my reasoning behind that here.

2. The chance at getting more traffic through StumbleUpon is too good to pass up. As you can see from this post, one of the most significant traffic days came from SU. I’ll be honest though, that was the end of my SU traffic-love so far; I haven’t seen much of a return since, but Su.pr offers more than just traffic. See #3.

3. Analytics. As you can see by the screenshot above and below I can track clickthroughs and traffic generated by direct and organic SU’s. Not only that I can get recommendations on best time to post. That’s pretty good stuff:

4. Customization settings are generous. Just like Backtype’s I get a lot of options:

Now, I’ve gone ahead and combined the two plugins and their functionality to achieve a happy mix of reporting and URL shortening with added bonuses of potential new eyes (traffic) and hosting them on my own blog (brand awareness).

So far I’m really happy with my choice and I love the flexibility and customization options that these two give me. There’s almost nothing more that I’d like to see from the two as it stands today (which is saying a lot) so bravo to the developers behind the tech. It’s not perfect but it’s very reasonable.

Finally, to cap it all off, with the recent news of Tr.im going prehistoric (and then pulling a savior-like resurrection) [Editor's Note: And disappearing, again. // July 2011] it reminds many that putting your faith (literally) in a URL shortener is a big deal; I don’t see StumbleUpon going anywhere, so I feel safe using their product long-term.

What are you using for your URL shortening and why?

[Image from Deb]