Will Paccione posted on December 12, 2009
I hear businesses all the time wondering if Social Media is helping their business or not. Let's face it, businesses want to expose themselves to potential clients.
So, how can you tell which Social Media platform is working for your business? One way is by checking your website analytics program. However, some people don't have access to their company analytics programs as they might have a "portal" page off their main company's website which is the bigger entity. Analytics programs and tell you a whole slew of information including where websites traffic comes from, however, they're are usually a step behind website technology.
An example being Twitter. A lot of people who use Twitter, use third party applications - Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc. When people visit your website from these third party apps, most analytics programs (at the time of this writing) won't show the referring application.
Most of the time the link you want to send out won't fit into your Twitter, LinkedIn or other Social Media sites since most can only fit 140 characters.
This is where URL shorteners like j.mp (bit.ly), budurl, tr.im and a slew of others come into play. The best thing about these URL shorteners over others, is that they're track-able. You can see how many people have clicked on the link you send out into the Twitterverse.
- Use if ro your Social Media platforms since it'll you who viewed it from an Adobe Air program..
- Use different URL's ones for different promotions you're tweeting and updating and see what's working and what's not. My buddy Doc uses this with great success for his clients when he's running promotions with coupons to track what Social Media sites are driving what coupon.
As you can see from the bit.ly (j.mp) chart above, the stats you get are
- Clicks
- Referring domains
- Countries sending traffic
- Adobe Air apps sending traffic
- Email clients
- and more
Which URL shortener do you use and why?