What’s a URL Shortener?

With a Twitter’s limit of 140 characters, every letter, space and punctuation point counts.  That’s why a link that is 100 characters all by itself just won’t do.  Luckily, many companies have taken this issue seriously and developed sites that shorten links down to around 20 characters.  Just paste in your link to one of these sites, hit shorten and voila — a Twitter friendly link.  And to make life even easier, most Twitter applications, including TweetFunnel, have integrated link shorteners so you can do everything in one place.

How do I Track Clicks on my Links?

It’s easy—just use a link shortening service with tracking capabilities.  Our two favorites are Bit.ly and BudURL.   You can shorten and track URLs directly from these sites, or you can use them in conjunction with other applications.

Below is a sample of Bit.ly tracking.  You can see the total number of clicks on your link, the number of clicks from other people’s links to the same page, when people clicked, and below the chart it even lists all the tweets containing that URL.

Example of Bit.ly Statistics

If you’re using TweetFunnel, follow these easy steps to automatically shorten and track your URLs:

• Sign up for a Bit.ly account here or a BudURL account here.
• Then in TweetFunnel, click on “Settings” in the upper right and then on “Manage Twitter Accounts, Credentials and Scheduler.”
• Then click on “Not Added” in the “Track Bit.ly URLs” or “Track BudURLs” column.
• Enter your Bit.ly or your BudURL username and API Key.  Your stats from links posted via TweetFunnel will display within your Bit.ly or your BudUrl account.