Twitter Image URL Shortner Not So Short

I got a glimpse of Twitter's new native URL shortener for images. In a recent tweet by @dannysullivan he referenced an image of the home page for Bing with a Panda on it. As you can see from the below screenshot the image URL is pic.twitter.com/HowIUza (Not sure if this is truly the best shortened domain name for images shared on Twitter.) The image URL shortening service has not been released to the general masses as it is still in beta. 

Pic.Twitter.com - Twitter Image URL Shortener

This seems to be bad news for twitpic (which some believe would be acquired by Twitter) and yfrog. But this just seems to be the next logical step in the Twitter evolution to harness the sharing/click data for their analytics dashboard (see Twitter Moves One Step Closer to Business Accounts).  

Ad.ly Analytics - Analyze Your Followers

Ad.ly, the Twitter sponsor ads company, has released a new Twitter analytic tool that allows you to analyze your Twitter followers. The tool allows you to see the percentage of Twitter followers who actually view and interact with your tweets, the male/female breakdown of your followers, and global and U.S location breakdown of your followers. The tool also provides a nice chart that displays the time of day you tweet, you get mentioned, and get retweeted.

Now this is the free version of the analytic report, but they do offer an Advanced Report for $9.99.  It looks like you can sign up for $9.99 a month or at a yearly rate of $99.99. The Advanced Report will provide you sentiment analysis, a list of followers who engage with you, and a list of your top 20 most influential followers. Not too sure about the last two features, but the sentiment analysis report may provide some nice information about how you are being perceived in the Twittershpere.

Twitter Click Tracking Being Implemented

Noticing today that Twitter has implemented click tracking on all links. I think this is part of their bigger plans for business accounts, but could also lead to some type of tracking report for all accounts. You will not notice the tracking link until after you click on a link, but go back and hover over the link and you will see the tracking URL. Here is an example:

/link_click_count?url=http%3A%2F%2Fshorturldomain.com%2Fu1BluI&linkType=web&tweetId=3679734683&userId=9726112&
authenticity_token=1bc57cbc4fb242b0b920ebd8901027d4b221772e

So you will notice that it tracks the outbound link, the type of link (in this case from the Twitter web site), the specific Twitter post id, the account id and some sort of authenticity token.

Tracking Your Traffic From Twitter

While reading a blog post this weekend on tracking referral data from Twitter I came across a fascinating and eye opening stat about Twitter. The post pointed me to @TweetStats, a third-party site that provides stats on the top ten Twitter Apps. In their data they show that 50% of traffic comes from Twitter Apps. Some have even said that upwards of 80% of traffic comes from Twitter Apps.

The thing to note is that you may be receiving more traffic from Twitter then you realize. Since any traffic coming from a Twitter App will be shown as direct traffic in your analytics program. If you are using Google Analytics, you can overcome this by adding tracking parameters to your URL strings.