Web feats 5: URL Shorteners

With the advent of Twitter has come the need to shrink web addresses (URLs) down in size so you don't take up too much of the 140 character limit. A lot of people share useful websites they have found with their Personal Learning Network (PLN) over Twitter. One of the best URL shorteners is Bitly. The reason it is useful to me, is that Bitly has so much more functionality than simply reducing the size of URLs.

The new look Bitly has tools that allow you to view statistics (metrics) about your shortened URLs, including how many others have clicked on your links, and an information page dedicated to each individual link, showing how many others have tweeted it, shared it, commented on it, and even useful stats on the top referring sites. These are very useful statistics if you want to trace the reach and effectiveness of your web site links. There are also easy shorcut tools that allow you to enter the long URL, click and then copy and paste the shortened URL into Twitter, Facebook, or wherever. The best bit about Bitly though, is the real time metrics section that displays hyperlinks of the Twitter accounts of all those who have retweeted your link. Cool stuff indeed.

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Web feats 5: URL Shorteners by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.