Link tracking in Twitter with wordpress support
I’ve been reading up a fair bit on social media advertising. I’ve been using twitter as a way to promote my WiFi Mapping project, WiFi in Australia. WiFi in Australia has been up for a little over two weeks now. I started a facebook group at the start of the project, and actively sent invites to people that I knew. I also started a Twitter account (wifi_australia). I only started actively started sending invites to people on Monday.
It is now Wednesday, and already 40% of my total traffic to my site has originated from Twitter and the number of people following my wifi twitter account increase everyday. What I wanted to know is which linking posts were attracting users to my site.
The use of URL-shortening services is popular on micro-blogging sites such as twitter, where character-efficiency is important. There are many services that do this, but some are starting to provide link-through statistics.
TweetBurner allows users to track the number of clicks for a given shortened URL, and users can display a summary of shortened URLs and their clickthrough count when logged in to their service.
TweetBurner is also supported by popular twitter apps such as TweetDeck (twurl). I have also found a modified version of Twitter Tools by Rebelic.com that supports TweetBurner URL-shortening. Twitter Tools is a popular plugin for Wordpress, that will notify a configured Twitter account of new blog posts, and link to the permalink. Now, with a mixture of TweetBurner and Twitter Tools (TweetBurner edition), I can track the clickthrough count for my blog posts!
A promising new URL-shortener and conversion tracker is Twitclicks. Twitclicks give a much deeper analysis of the click-through events. For a given link, it will show you the total number of clicks, the percentage of your followers that have clicked and a breakdown of stats on the user including browser, OS, geographic location, click source (website or external app) and even screen resolution.
Twitclicks is by far the most comprehensive click-through service I have seen. Unfortunately it is not yet supported by many apps (read: my favourite twitter app, TweetDeck) and I am yet to find a Wordpress plugin for it.. but I am sure these will come soon!
TweetBurner: http://tweetburner.com/
TweetClicks: http://www.twitclicks.com/
Twitter Tools (TweetBurner.com edition): http://rebelic.nl/tweetburnercom-plugin/
Chris is a shining example of how, in a world where abortion is not as easily obtained as a leg of fried chicken, an ounce of prevention can be worth more than its weight in gold. He is currently completing a PhD in Bioinformatics which he hopes may one day help him get out of a speeding ticket.