Monitor Your Social Media Initiatives with Trackable Shortened URLs

With the rise of social media comes the truncation of communcation. Our interactions with individuals continues to get smaller and smaller. Now with Twitter being all the rage (and rightly so), our interactions (at least via Twitter) are limited to 140 characters. This doesn’t give us a lot of space to say what we have to say. So, when you include a link in your Tweets, it needs to be as short as possible.  So, I thought I’d give you a quick list of good URL shorteners.

There are numerous URL shortening services out there but I thought I wouldn’t overload you with options, and just give you four good suggestions.

Bit.ly

With Bit.ly you can save all of the shortened URLs you create. This tools tracks the conversations that include your shortened URL. You can view the number of clicks from each source as well. Very handy!

Cligs

Cligs provides real-time traffic stats, along with geographic data on users who click on your shortened URL. You can see the number of Delicious saves. These URLs are search engine friendly and they are fully customizable.

budurl

Budurl claims that they are most the most powerful click stats tracking available. I can neither support nor dispute this claim. However, you can customize your shortened URLs and track your clicks and stats. However, to get a deeper level of stats, you can upgrade to a paid account with Budurl. This just depends on how detailed you need your stats to be.

tr.im

With tr.im you can customize your shortened URLs, and you can track the number of clicks generated by your shortened URLs.

Question: what do all of these have in common (besides shortening URLs)? They can all track the performance of your shortened URLs. You obviously have a purpose for your social media endevours (you should!) and these tools will help you gage your success at generating clicks to your blog or starting conversations.

This article is short and sweet… I’m staying with the theme of keeping things short! But if you are using Twitter, Facebook or any other site with limited character space, you need to short your URLs! These are a few helpful tools to shorten your URLs but also track the effectiveness of your social media strategies.

*** Do you like this article? Receive future SEO Boy articles free and automatically via email or via RSS. ***

• Top 5 Best Practices for Video SEO
• Learn More about The Search Monitor – SWEEPSTAKES SPONSOR
• 2 Ways of Using Social Media to Improve Your SEO Campaign
• SEO News Round Up For October 9, 2009
• SEO News Round Up for June 5, 2009

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Social Media & SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.