When you are writing a blog entry, or posting a Twitter update, or a Facebook status change, you may need to include a url. Normally I would just put the url in and call it good. But I have finally found a very important reason to use a url shortener. Url Shorteners are not new, they have been around for quite a while and I have tried them once or twice, but mostly ignored them. Now that I am interested in knowing more about how people respond to my posts, I have found that the bit.ly url shortener is most valuable. You can log in and trend how many people have used the url over time. Yes, Yes, I know, I should probably have my metrics tracking set up on my blog and all that, but I don’t. Furthermore, if I did, I would still not know how many people got there from which link that I released. If I want to track which is getting more exposure, Facebook, or Twitter, then I can create 2 links to the same place and then see which one gets more clicks. So, my new approach to linking is to first go to http://bit.ly (make a free account if you don’t have one yet), and paste in my long url, bit.ly will give me a nice little short one (one that fits better in facebook and twitter). As my post becomes more popular, I can see that people are clicking on it from bit.ly’s site. So, in the future you may want to also use a service like this. It sure makes things easier to track and it is easier on everyone’s eyes too.

Blogging, Facebook, Twitter Hide