Now shortening your website links is nothing new. The ability to take a long website url and shorten it. Reason? The reduced character count is useful for social networks, especially twitter where characters count.
You might be familiar with bit.ly and tiny url, but there are so many others available to use. Not forgetting that you can even setup a url shortener on your own domain.
I’ve realised a great reason to use less common services.
Chances are you are the only one using a less popular shortened url service on social networks like twitter for example. Which means less common url services could help you monitor traffic as part of marketing campaigns or partnerships, plus gain a greater understand of your social network business activities. Though bare in mind due to prospective visitor lack of familiarity with a service, you might receive less visitor traffic. Also paid url shortener services generally offer various bells and whistles (such as custom shorten urls) and you ‘might’ benefit from that route. Though if your only motivation is monitoring a campaign or assessing social network activity, plus squeezing your urls, a nifty idea.
Which leads me to my new favourite url shortener service.
Google! Yep the google team have a url shortener service and it is pretty good. Like bit.ly not only can you create the new url, but also you can monitor the statistics. Again like bit.ly anyone who knows the url can view the statistics via a dynamic generated url.
I’m already using google’s service to monitor campaigns and working with others to help gain a greater understanding the impact of our social media activities. To help answer questions such as: ‘How effective is a tweet with a url for my small business?‘ – ‘Is my message unclear or requires improvement?‘ – ‘Should I just spend the time elsewhere and drink more tea?‘.
A free way to improve analysis of your social network activities!
Then monitoring the url shortened statistics others elsewhere use to mention websites (bit.ly mentions for instance) to gauge their impact also and assist analysis. Couple this with the usual website statistics you use and you have a powerful set of tools at hand.
Example:
– http://Bit.ly <– monitor general mentions
– http://goo.gl <– use for partnerships, campaigns and gauge your own efforts.
– Your own website statistics
To properly use the service you need to have a google account and login first and you can find the url shorterner here: http://goo.gl
My conclusion
Now this isn’t the perfect solution, perhaps not even the best free way of going about this, I’ve not researched. If google’s own url shortener service takes off then you will need to find an alternate method to track your own efforts.
However currently it is beyond how many other social network business users monitor their efforts and could help you gauge just how effective your tweets are. It does add another much needed dimension to website statistics and social network activity, rather than solely counting retweets and looking at your website stats.
Please leave me your thoughts and feedback.