Wednesday 9 May 2012

Twitter Basics: Counting your click-throughs

Here we go, the first of a series of posts covering some social media basics.

There are lots of great tools for posting and measuring clicks on links in tweets, the free versions of which often provide a good but limited service - I fully recommend checking out Buffer and Hootsuite.

However, if you don't have any budget, but need to record these statistics, Tweetdeck and Bitly work really well together. Here's how you sync them:

1. Create a Tweetdeck account and add your profile/s to it. You can download Tweetdeck to your desktop, use the Tweetdeck web app, or install Tweetdeck for Chrome (my personal favourite).

2. Create a Bitly account.

3. When you've created your Bitly account, click on 'Settings', scroll down the page and find your API key (a long combination of letters and numbers). Copy this and open Tweetdeck.

4. When you're in Tweetdeck, click on 'Settings' and then 'Services':
  • Set your 'Link Shortening' service to 'bit.ly'
  • Enter your Bitly username
  • Paste in your Bitly API key

5. When you've saved those changes, any links that you tweet from Tweetdeck will automatically be shortened using your Bitly account (yay).You can measure the click-throughs on these links by logging in to your Bitly account.

So, what do you think - Is that useful, do you have any other/betters tools, tips or solutions? I've got a feeling that some people will flag-up Google Analytics as a solution, and it certainly is a really strong, free tool - Have you got any Google Analytics tips for measuring the impact of your social media presence?

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