Why Twitter's T.co Is a Game Changer

macslocum writes "If Twitter is so inclined, the company could turn the new t.co shortening service into a powerful analytics tool that solves the marketing and tracking issues of off-site engagement."

Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Another way for marketers to track your usage.

*shrug*

[garcia]

From the article:

This is why short URLs are so important. URLs survive the share. Because the interested reader is forced to go to the URL shortener to map the short URL to the real one, whoever owns the shortener sees the engagement between the audience and the content, no matter where it happens. That's why URLs are the new cookies.

As long as you keep the URL shortened and are sharing it on Twitter. What about when you cross those boundaries and share on Facebook (which is the biggest social network) or e-mail or chat or whatever? Once you take the ball out of Twitter's court the analytics become useless from t.co--just like any other URL shortener.

This is a non-issue for the privacy geeks as they'll just share the original URL and not do it via Twitter.

Honestly, Twitter traffic is fairly useless for anyone as the visitors tend to be one-time flybys who spend less than a few seconds on your endsite and just end up lowering your time on site and raising your bounce metrics. If you want engagement you better be using some other network to get your funnel working the way you want.

Re:Just what we need

[hierophanta]

i click on anything i feel like - and my usage is tracked by the governmental organization i work for. the solution is no-script and a firewall that works. come on, we are supposed to be nerds - how is not clicking an option?

Re:Just what we need

[HTH NE1]

I dislike unnecessarily shortened URLs. It's like people who will abbreviate every word they can in a text message when they're not sending anything near the limit. (Or worse, in contexts where there are no such limits.) Now there are programs for tweeters that will automatically shorten every embedded URL this way. I'd much rather they only shorten them when needed.

Meanwhile news sites should be paying attention to which stories get more traffic and proactively provide their own short paths to the story for purposes of tweeting.

And if Twitter wanted control over shortening services, they should just adopt their own syntax for it. "^code" could be remapped in their own database to hyperlink on display, mouse-over could still expand before following, and would take far less space than "http://T.co/code". And they still could do it through a redirection URL so they can track click-through like FARK.com does, using scripting to rewrite the status bar to hide the full redirection URL.

Unless they really want to track the sharing of the links off-site, just to have the most information possible. (And the Referer [sic] header handles differentiation there.) Then they could combine it all: ^code in sight maps to http://t.co/code [t.co] cite which redirects to site, with mouse-over showing full site's URL cite to user's sight, but copying the link and pasting gets the tico code cite.

Re:*shrug*

[gamricstone]

I have never visited the above site before, and currently have no-script enabled in firefox. The above page still automatically redirects for me. I've purged my whitelist of any websites I don't frequent, but am still unable to cancel the redirect. So I ask, how did you configure no-script not to redirect from the above url? *Note I have visited sites before where the redirect was canceled by no-script, listing the targeted url for redirect.