Today Tech Crunch provided retailers and brands with technological goodness. Mixx (a site very similar to Digg) is venturing into new territory with the launch of TweetMixx Channels. The service lets brands, celebs and companies aggregate their Twitter traffic and mentions on one page.

How Many Retailers or Brands Know About Creating Branded Twitter Channels?

One luxury brand, Aston Martin.

One retailer, TopShop.

One mega celebrity, Oprah.

And an indie hybrid guitar community, Fretbase.

Whoa! That’s not a lot.

About Tweet Mix

Tweet mix offers an incredibly easy solution for brands to utilize Twitter’s platform to create a community experience on the brand’s, company’s or celebrity personality’s website. Hot sexy feature: how URLs unwrap and nicely integrate in a website. A great example can be seen on guitar auction/forum/community site Fretbase.

Fetbase.com, Guitar Retail & Review Community

According to Tech Crunch:

TweetMixx Channels features branded, customizable pages, with the brand’s current Twitter feed, tweets and updates from fans, and links relevant to content about the brand, company or topic posted automatically. The tool also serves as a tracking and monitoring tool for mentions and conversations about a brand taking place on Twitter.

Companies can create a customizable branded page with a vanity URL and can designate an “Insiders” tab within the channel which has a list of Twittering employees or users associated with a company. Channels also include a “Chatter” tab that uses a list of search terms relevant to a company or brand to find both tweets and links that contain those terms; a “Links” tab that displays the hyperlinks containing matches to the list of search terms; and a widget to share and link to a brand’s site, blog, Facebook or MySpace page and more.

Instant community building and engagement anyone? This appears to be an excellent platform for brands who are seeking to incorporate micro communities into their micro sites or create searchable, micro communities as a destination within their main websites (could this be the way around that pesky flash problem?).

To sweeten the deal, Tweetmix serves as a pretty sweet content discovery engine as well. TweetMixx also acts as a Twitter client (you can tweet directly from it) and features filtered search options (much like our favorite program Hootsuite), which makes it an all-in-one platform for both the brand and the consumer that interacting with the brand. This is a very cost effective way to maintain and monitor a community in-house 0r via an agency implementing a brand’s social media efforts.

TweetMixx only competition is TweetMeme ( TweetMeme is an engine for Twitter link discovery similar to TweetMixx). TweetMeme also features branded channels, with retail giant TopShop, luxury auto maker AstonMartin, and Oprah. On TweetMeme’s channels, content is broken down by news, video and images whereas TweetMixx breaks the stream down by the Insiders, general chatter and links. “Bit.ly also features analytics and information on links and will soon feature a link discovery engine of their own, but it’s unclear if it will include branded channels” adds Tech Crunch.

In our initial assessments, TweetMixx may offer better customization and potential user interaction. We’ll write a future post on our findings after use.

TopShop TweetMeme Stream

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