Find Out How Many People are Clicking on Your Links in Twitter!

One of the more frustrating aspects of social media and social networking for recruiters is that sometimes, you just don’t know how effective your efforts are. You don’t know if you’re connecting with people, and if you are, how many people.

Well, I have good news for you: there is one way you can track how effective your social media efforts are in Twitter. However, there are a couple of prerequisites for this:

You have to include a link in your tweets.
This link must be a shortened link, and it must be a bit.ly shortened link.

There are a few URL shorteners out there, and bit.ly is one of them. It’s probably the most popular and well known of the shorteners that exist. Here’s how you find out how many of the people following you on Twitter are clicking on the links in your tweets:

Use bit.ly to shorten your link (browse to their website and follow the directions).
Paste the bit.ly link in your tweet.
Tweet your information.
Later, after a length of time has passed, copy the bit.ly link and paste it into a web browser.
Add a + sign after the link.
Click “Enter.”

Doing so will take you to a page on the bit.ly website that displays statistics related to your link. First and foremost, you can tell how many people have clicked on the link within your tweet, and you can tell when they clicked on it (the day and the time of day). Other information provided includes whether or not the tweet has been involved in any conversations on Twitter, if any comments were made about it, and what the referring sites were.

Try this geek trick the next time you include a link in one of your tweets. Find out how many of your followers are clicking on that link . . . and when they clicked on it.

I’d also love your feedback. Let me know how this trick works for you and what you think about it. Post a comment below with your thoughts.

(Todd Bossler is a writer for the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog.)

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Comment by James Mayes on November 5, 2010 at 9:35am: This is a good start, but you may find links get broken and remade when people have other url shorteners built into their Twitter client. Run a comparison with backtweets.com - which identifies the long version of the URL, then searches for every tweet that refers to it, regardless of the short link used. I often find I get blog retweets that I didn't know about - backtweets is one of the few ways I can identify this.

Comment by Pamela Bovaird on December 15, 2010 at 11:16am: Wonderful, guys. So tell me what other tools are you using on Twitter? And how are you using Twitter?

Comment by James Mayes on December 15, 2010 at 11:20am: I use Twitter for networking, learning, and occasionally, entertainment! I work with a technology provider and I'm constantly evaluating new Twitter tools - I tend to blog about my favourites over on musingsfromsussex.com - you'd be welcome to stop by. The article on CrowdBooster would probably interest you - follower analysis and efficiency tool.

Comment by C. B. Stalling!! on December 16, 2010 at 6:52am: I like the tool called the phone!

Comment by Jerry Albright on December 21, 2010 at 12:42pm: Thanks Todd. Learning about the "+" feature on Bit.ly links was informative. I went over to Twitter and found a few links that had been RT'd to death - the ones everyone feels somewhat obligated to RT since it came from "higher up" if you know what I mean.

Funny thing I found was the several links I pasted back into the Bit.ly site had more RTs than actual clicks. So people are just passing along links they don't even look at themselves.......very informative to say the least.

Thanks for this info Todd.