URL Shorteners: The Good and Bad
Say it in 140! Twitter the fast growing micro blogging platform is simple to use. You have up to 140 characters to say whatever you want to say (hopefully something of value to your community). This has led to the numerous URL shorteners that have come into the market. Some of the articles/blog posts you want to link to are rather long and when character count is a premium, enter URL Shorteners.
The Good: Typically, URL shorteners make up a random path for your URLs — those /123yq or /bg45a etc. Some of them allow you to override this, so that your path can have a "custom" end. For example, http://tr.im/rsajja is one I used on my social media profiles that redirects to this blog.
Have people been clicking on your URLs that you tweet? A service like Google Analytics (still free!) can show you traffic that comes from Twitter or any other social media site, but you might want to drill down further than it allows. A number of URL shortening services provide tracking stats, which in turn range from basic to extensive reporting. I have liked tr.im but with some of its temporary outages, I have personally learnt to like bit.ly but there are quite a few that are good.
The screenshot above shows one of the most recent tweets and the associated tracking available on bit.ly. It shows the number of clicks (42) to date and also shows what platforms are working best. In this example, it was my email signature and Facebook had majority of the click throughs.
The bad: Using URL Shorteners does not provide SEO benefit unless the URL service provides a permanent redirect (301 redirect for you techies) option. So, use it where necessary and when you only have 140 characters to say it, it may be essential to use. The web purists will argue that it slows down the web with all the URL shorteners and the added dependency on these URL shortener companies to be around, but it may be a necessary evil in today's micro blogging world!
You would think Twitter at some point will offer its own URL shortening service or just buy one (if so, bit.ly please!). It is more likely to happen than not!
The Good: Typically, URL shorteners make up a random path for your URLs — those /123yq or /bg45a etc. Some of them allow you to override this, so that your path can have a "custom" end. For example, http://tr.im/rsajja is one I used on my social media profiles that redirects to this blog.
Have people been clicking on your URLs that you tweet? A service like Google Analytics (still free!) can show you traffic that comes from Twitter or any other social media site, but you might want to drill down further than it allows. A number of URL shortening services provide tracking stats, which in turn range from basic to extensive reporting. I have liked tr.im but with some of its temporary outages, I have personally learnt to like bit.ly but there are quite a few that are good.
The screenshot above shows one of the most recent tweets and the associated tracking available on bit.ly. It shows the number of clicks (42) to date and also shows what platforms are working best. In this example, it was my email signature and Facebook had majority of the click throughs.
The bad: Using URL Shorteners does not provide SEO benefit unless the URL service provides a permanent redirect (301 redirect for you techies) option. So, use it where necessary and when you only have 140 characters to say it, it may be essential to use. The web purists will argue that it slows down the web with all the URL shorteners and the added dependency on these URL shortener companies to be around, but it may be a necessary evil in today's micro blogging world!
You would think Twitter at some point will offer its own URL shortening service or just buy one (if so, bit.ly please!). It is more likely to happen than not!
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