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Learn More: Link Tracking
On Friday we talked about some of our favorite social tools, one of them being bitly. bitly is a link tracking and shortening service that tells you who is clicking your links and when. This information is crucial to figuring out what kind of traffic you’re driving, if your content is keeping people engaged and if the links to your site are inviting. bitly and sites like it are becoming essential to better create and manage your content and links.
Thankfully, link tracking tools are very easy to use, and most just require a quick registration. They allow you to shorten, share and track links. Unlike site analytics programs, link tracking sites allow you track links from as many different websites as you would like all at once. These sites work by creating a shortened link for the URL you copy and paste into their program. Once the shortened link is created from you original URL you can then use that shortened link, which will look something like this: http://ow.ly/qtlro anywhere you’d like and see real time date for clicks. These shortened links function just like regular URLs.
Link tracking is helpful for seeing how often your link has been clicked, what the most popular click times were and clicks over a longer period of time like multiple months. You can take the link data these sites share and see what kind of content you’re sharing gets the most clicks and at what time to ensure you are posting content your visitors will like. Link tracking sites are also great for Twitter and other micro blogging sites with limited space as these services can make even the longer links much shorter.
Some examples of link tracking sites to check out:
bitly- http://bitly.com/
TweetBurner- http://tweetburner.com/
Tiny URL- http://tinyurl.com/
Ow.ly- http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url
Our Favorite Social Tools Right Now
Social media is a powerful marketing tool, but it can be hard to keep up with the trends. It seems like a new social media tool goes live each day and it’s your job to figure out if it could benefit you or not. We’re sharing some of our most recent favorite tools to help keep you on trend.
Topsy is a powerful tool for Twitter insights. While Facebook has a robust insights offering for its pages, Twitter leaves you mostly on your own. Enter tools like Topsy that can track your tweets, popularity and engagement. Topsy says they provide “social insights” and “analyze billions of conversations in real time.” This is a great tool to help you grow and streamline your 
Twitter activity.
If you’re thrown off by all of the social network pages you need to visit to keep up, you’re not alone. RebelMouse has created a social front page that can connect many of your accounts and updates the page as you update each account. You can see in the screen shot to the right that RebelMouse takes a attractive approach to sharing your updates. This is a great tool to attract followers from one network to another or to create a unique one page presence online.
Want to know what kind of clicks the links you share are getting? Enter bitly who invites you to “Do more with your links.” It’s one of my free link shortening sites that provides analytics with each link. According to their site, “bitly is available via our website, browser extensions, mobile web, and numerous third-party tools integrated with our open public API.” Use this site for all your links to track click frequency, times, engagement and more.