Blogging Basics 101 » twitter

What is a URL shortener? Should I use an URL shortener?

Melanie Nelson — Mon, 17 May 2010 11:30:41 +0000

URL shorteners aren’t new, but not everyone knows what they are or understands how useful they can be. I want to introduce you to a few URL shortening tools and explain how they can make a real difference in the way you track what your audience is doing with your information.

Why Should I Shorten My URLs?

URL shorteners have been around for years and most do the same thing: they take a long URL (http://www.bloggingbasics101.com/2010/04/helpful-blogging-links-get-shared-on-facebook/) and making it into a short URL (http://bit.ly/ckNJhr). There are several advantages to shortening your URL:

If you’re sharing a link on Twitter, you’re limited to 140 characters. Any URL you share can quickly eat up those characters and limit your actual message. (Tip: You don’t want to just post a link; you wan to tell people what they can expect when they click over.)
Any time your link is visible, the longer it is, the harder it is to remember (and it’s not very pretty, either). Shortening it (especially if you use a service that allows you choose a keyword for the link; see below for some options) can solve this problem in some cases.
Some URL shortening tools allow you to track how your audience uses and shares your URL.

URL Shorteners with Keywords

These services not only allow you to shorten your URL:

Not only do they shorten your URL, they give you the option of choosing a specific keyword to include in the URL. The result is something like http://doiop.com/blogging. These services don’t allow you to track your stats, but you can use Google Analytics to track specific user behavior or referral information for the page you’re linking to. For basic shortening with no bells and whistles, you can use one of these services:

URL Shorteners with Analytics

For those of you who want to know who’s clicking on or sharing your links, you’ll want to consider using a more powerful tool like the ones listed below.

Bit.ly allows you track the short URLs you create with an analytics page for each URL. You can determine your top referrers, reader location, actual clicks. Bit.ly is free. Some people have been confused when their Bit.ly statistics and their Google Analytics statistics don’t match up. It appears that there a few reasons for this.

No two analytics programs are going to ever show the same data; they all have different interpretations of data.
When you use Bit.ly (and possibly any URL shortening tool) to shorten a URL on, say, Twitter, Twitter will then look up the link via bots/spiders. Your Bit.ly stats include those false hits in their stats. I say “false hits” because those aren’t really pairs of eyes seeing your content, it’s just Twitter’s bots finding the link. Google Analytics won’t count those bots in its statistics.

Clicky.me requires you to run their analytics program on your web site (similar to Google Analytics) and will then track many of the same metrics Google Analytics tracks: “top referring domains, top countries, average time on site, bounce rate, etc)” as well as individual visitors. Because the clicky.me shortened URLs are linked to the clicky.me analytics you run on your site, the stats they provide are specifically for your web site; if you choose to share a link to another site that’s not running the clicky.me analytics (for instance, if you’re part of a campaign that’s tweeting links for a client), you’ll only be able to track how many times the link is clicked, not what people do once they arrive at your site. Clicky.me offers both a free and premium accounts, but the free account only allows you to shorten five URLs each day.

HootSuite.com is a very popular tool because, in addition to shortening URLs, it provides a suite of tools to help you manage your social media presence. You can

track stats (including the most influential re-tweeters of your link)
set up a Twitter dashboard similar to what you may be used to with Tweetdeck (you can have columns dedicated to specific keywords, hashtags, or users)
schedule tweets
manage multiple Twitter accounts
collaborate with your team

There are actually many more features offered by HootSuite, but I suggest you check out the HootSuite blog for more info. HootSuite is free.

photo credit: LunaDiRimmel

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Year In Review: The Best of 2009′s Technology Trends and Downloads

Melanie Nelson — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:30:03 +0000

Growing up, I *loved* the end-of-year wrap-ups on various news shows. I enjoyed looking back at everything that happened with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Of course, now, I rarely turn on the television and I find most of my news and recaps via the Web — including my end-of-year recaps. I’ve seen so many Best Of lists over the past week, I decided I’d like to share some of them with you. A sort of Best of 2009 link round up for techies.

Twitter Trends for 2009

If you weren’t on Twitter this year, you weren’t getting your breaking news. Here are two articles that look back at what happened on the second-biggest social network this year:

Twitter Reveals Most Discussed Topics of 2009 by Ben Parr via Mashable. This list provides a break down of what we Twittered this year. From Michael Jackson to Google Wave to Harry Potter, Twitter was the way news broke and was dissected and discussed.
Twitter’s Top 10 Tech Trends of 2009 by Jolie O’Dell via Read Write Web. Not surprisingly, Google Wave is number one. As techies, you’ll be interested to see what the other nine most talked about topics were. It was interesting to me that conferences made the list. If you’ve had any doubt that your hashtags are important, worry no more.

Most Popular Downloads for 2009

I love efficiency. This year iPhone apps, Mac apps, and even Windows apps enabled me to achieve a higher level of efficiency. Oh my word, I love technology and it’s ability to make my life faster and easier.

The App Store’s Biggest (Official) Hits of 2009 by John Herrman via Gizmodo. Mr. Herrman provides Apple’s official list of what’s hot and what’s not this year in the App Store. The lists include apps and games divided into best sellers and top rated. I was surprised there weren’t more free apps included in the lists. I’d love to know what your favorites were this year. Will you leave me a comment and let me know what apps or games you can’t live without? (If you happen to remember the cost, please include that as well.)
Most Popular Free Mac Downloads of 2009 by Adam Pash via Lifehacker. Two things in my life that I love? My Mac and efficiency. So many times those two things go together. This list provides some of the most fun and efficient tools you can download for your Mac.
Most Popular Free Mac Downloads of 2009 by Adam Pash via Lifehacker. Although I love my Mac, my family also has a PC running Windows. This article lists some of the most popular downloads for that OS.

More Best of 2009 Lists

Check out Lifehackers entire Best Of series. It includes lists for Linux, photography, how-tos, and more.
Jennifer Wagner links to 15 Best of 2009 lists including The Best TV Lines of 2009
2009 Best of What’s New via Popsci is broken into categories like Engineering, Home Tech, Gadgets, Health, Green Tech, and more.
Gina Trapani breaks down why Google had a banner year in 2009 in her article This Year in Google: The 2009 Edition. She says, “When technologists of the future look back in time, they’ll remember 2009 as the year Google got serious about an internet operating system, speeding up the web, and indexing EVERYTHING in sight. Take a look at the year 2009 in Google.”
AdWeek Media has their picks for the best of marketing and media Best of the 2000s.
Mashable has several lists, but I found The 10 Most Innovative Viral Video Ads of 2009 to be quite entertaining.

This article is cross-posted at BlogHer.com.

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How to Automatically Publish Your Latest Posts to Twitter

Melanie Nelson — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:00:39 +0000

For the last six or eight months, a friend of mine has told me that she uses Twitter as her RSS feed. She follows everyone she’s interested in and follows the links they provide via Twitter (whether to personal or news blogs). She doesn’t use any other aggregator. Her experience made me stop and think: do all bloggers think to link their blogs to their Twitter account? Depending on where you are in your social media journey, this may be a new idea for you. You may not be aware of the tools available to help you link your accounts so readers, no matter where they are, can find you.

Twitterfeed
Twitterfeed allows you set it and forget it (wow, I really hope that’s not trademarked by the Ronco guy–it’s just so snappy). By associating your blog’s RSS with your Twitterfeed account, any time you publish a new article on your blog, the URL is shortened via bit.ly and fed directly to Twitter via your Twitter account (you can also feed it to Facebook). In addition, the confirmation email I received said, “If you use Feedburner and have authorized their awareness api then you can also see those stats on your dashboard, making it easy to compare your traditional RSS distribution with Twitterfeed’s social distribution.” If you take advantage of that feature, you could find some interesting correlations.

To set up a Twitterfeed account:

Go to Twitterfeed.com.
Complete the sign-up form with an email address and password.
Choose whether you’d like your feed to be sent to Twitter or Facebook.
Connect with the appropriate account by clicking either the Authenticate Twitter (to send your feed to Twitter) or Connect with Facebook (to send your feed to Facebook) button.
Type in the name of the feed you want to send out.
Type in the URL of the feed you want to send out.
Click Update Feed.

If you like, you can use the advanced settings to set

update frequency (every 30 minutes, every hour, on up to every day)
whether to include the title and/or post description
which service to use to shorten your links (e.g., bit.ly, SnipURL, TinyURL, etc.)
post prefixes and suffixes

TypePad
TypePad has recently unveiled some new feature to its software. One of those features allows you to share your newest posts with Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed as they are published. To use this feature, though, you’ll need to link your TypePad account with those third-party social media tools. Just go to Settings > Sharing and choose which accounts you want to share your TypePad posts with. Right now you can only share your posts with Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed. Once you’ve established a connection between your TypePad account and your other social media accounts, follow these instructions for sharing your posts with Twitter (and/or Facebook and FriendFeed):

Write your post as usual.
Check the box next to Twitter (and/or Facebook and FriendFeed) under Share This Post in the right sidebar of the New Post page.
Save/publish your post as usual. When the post is published, TypePad will send the permalink of the article (shortend via bit.ly) to the accounts you checked.

Do it yourself
You may not want to tweet everything you post. Many people choose to tweet only posts by others or posts they’ve written themselves only if it relates to a specific, current conversation. In those cases, you can simply paste the permalink into your tweet and Twitter will automatically shorten the link via bit.ly.

You’ve probably noticed that the tools I’ve recommended all use bit.ly to shorten your URLs. It’s by far the most popular URL-shortener and I encourage you to try it out. The feature that makes bit.ly so popular, I think, is that it allows you to set up an account with them and track how many click-throughs your bit.ly links receive. If you’re tracking that information, you can really get a good idea of which social media communities are using your information consistently. You can also track which topics are more popular than others. When it comes to data tracking, the possibilities are endless. Bit.ly is just one more tool for your arsenal.