Karen James - Cloud VA

Shortening & Tracking Links

Karen JamesCloud VA

http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

When you want to share a link to an interesting article via Twitter sometimes the link is far too long!

http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

http://bit.ly is a very useful tool that can save you characters and you can track how many people are

clicking on it

Sign up is simple – just enter a username, email address & password

http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

This is what it looks like once you’ve signed up and signed in

http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

Copy the url of the page you want to share with people

http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

Paste it into the ‘shorten your link’ box in bit.ly

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5459/Small-Businesses-That-Blog-Have-102-More-Twitter-Followers.aspx

http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

This will automatically shorten your link

http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

Click ‘Copy’

http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

Paste the link into your Twitter post

The shortened link gives you more room to say something about the article and still have characters

left over for re-tweeting!

http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

You can also track how many people click on your link.Scroll down the bit.ly page and you’ll see a list of your

shortened links with numbers next to them

The ‘5’ means five people have clicked on the link you posted and the ‘5,400’ is the number of people in total who have clicked on other links

to that page from various places around the internet

http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

Clicking on each of these figures in turn brings up a page that shows you which sites these links were clicked from

and which countries those people were in

http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

Great for shortening your links and finding out which links people find most interesting

Hope you found that helpful

See you soon

Karen