Do you use URL shorteners for your links on Twitter? This is good practice because 1) it allows you to use more characters in your tweet and 2) it often allows you to track the link clicks on your URL (like through services such as bit.ly). If you're relying on tracking link clicks through your URL shortener of choice, you might be interested it know that Twitter is taking their first steps to remove all other URL shorteners before releasing their own. Just today, Twitter has released a way to un-shorten a URL someone posts on the site, which means if you get a lot of traffic from Twitter you may want to look at some other ways to start tracking individual click sources. I've got some screenshots and full details on my blog here: Bye Bye Bit.ly? but here are the details: - Twitter wants to create their own URL shortener, we don't know if it'll have click tracking or not (and if it does, if that's a premium service) - Just this week Twitter has launched in their search results a way to unshorten URLs other people post on the site - If you use a URL shortener, in particular if you use one to track link clicks, that will become less effective starting immediately. I find Twitter very effective for marketing my site, but it's also good to know which links are most popular, where they are being retweeted, and to have the control that a url shortener such as bit.ly provides. It'll be interesting to see how Twitter's own url shortener looks.... Meg
It will be hard to give competition to existing services but who knows they are expert in viral marketing.
I really like bitly they are very good and they give excellent statistics. However, I don't usually use them when I post my links to twitter because sometimes I found it to tedious. If twitter did come up with their own url shortener it would be a lot easier.