Following Your Content with URL Shorteners

Don’t forget to follow your content because social is now a large part of search results for people. Search results from all major search engines give weight to content that is getting a high social score due to being talked about or shared on social sites like Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Pinterest, and others.

A great way to follow content is to use an URL shortener that includes metrics. A URL shortener is exactly what it sounds like — a service that makes the link to your content smaller and easier to share on social networks. Layered on top of your other analytics solutions, a URL shortener gives you a way to follow a link as it’s carried off of your site through conversation. It helps you find and engage with your customers and potential customers no matter where they’re talking about your content.

One example of a great URL shortener is Bit.ly. Bit.ly allows custom links, which makes each link easy to remember and share. It also tracks your link as it travels online and then delivers information to you about who is engaging with that link and sharing it further.

You can choose from many URL shorteners. (In fact, we covered quite a few in another Wiley book — Twitter For Dummies, which I wrote with Laura Fitton and Michael Gruen!) Bit.ly is just one example. Whichever one you like best, make sure that it has analytics and make sure that you remember to create campaigns to track the original URL and the shortened URL (a campaign group) in your site’s analytics program.

As you can see, getting good metrics to study and use requires a many-layered approach. Your web site is your home base and the spot on the web that you own and control, so you should be directing all traffic there. However, it’s a social web, so you have to be prepared to follow your content and grab those metrics wherever they go.