Twitter is getting into analytics. Finally. This week, the microblogging service announced that it will be updating its URL shortener t.co to help alleviate malware problems and track link sharing on its service.
By the end of the year, t.co links will be more secure, and provide more information to the people that share them. This is good news for marketers.
As the company wrote this week, Twitter's in-house URL shortener t.co will be expanded so links are easier to read:
"Wrapped links are displayed in a way that is easier to read, with the actual domain and part of the URL showing, so that you know what you are clicking on. When you click on a wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware, and we then will forward you on to the destination URL. All of that should happen in an instant."
Depending on implemenation, the new links could be problematic for retweeting. But screening for malware is a good idea. More important for businesses, Twitter will finally start sharing link data:
"When you click on these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click. We hope to use this data to provide better and more relevant content to you over time."
A major weakness for social media marketing is the current inability to track shared messages. Twitter's search engine Summize only goes back a few days. Brands trying to follow their mentions (and retweets and conversions) don't have an easy time of it at present.
Twitter's new service will be a big help. As CNET writes:
"Knowing what links are popular can help a sufficiently sophisticated Web site refine its recommendations, and likely will let Twitter improve its "promoted tweets" program and its resonance algorithm, which uses metrics like number-of-clicks to decide which messages are relevant and useful."If Twitter can share some of the info it uses to make Promoted Tweets relevant, businesses will benefit.
For brands, it's important to know what's happening with Twitter messages. When I spoke with Ben & Jerry's Kate Lee this summer, she noted Twitter makes marketing difficult, despite the popularity of the channel:
"Twitter is a little more difficult. It’s also hard to know who you’re reaching. It doesn't really tell you the breakdown."
If social media can become more measurable, even more digital marketing will head in that direction.
There are some privacy concerns. According to CNET:
"Wednesday's news was soon met with a smattering of privacy concerns, with some Twitter users dubbing it a "disgusting data landgrab" and others wondering if there will be an "opt-out policy" for those who prefer not to have their clicks recorded. Another concern: a centralized link-redirector means a centralized point of failure in a service known for being frequently overloaded." Twitter can deal with those issues — and at the least offer an opt out for privacy conscious users — because the new updates will actually help protect users from the pitfalls of blind links. Once businesses start getting some useful information out of the links they're sharing on Twitter, they can really dial up on the messaging that's working for them, and start getting more out of their social media efforts.Based in New York, Meghan Keane is US Editor of Econsultancy. You can follow her on Twitter: @keanesian.
9:40PM on 5th September 2010
"Brands trying to follow their mentions (and retweets and conversions) don't have an easy time of it at present."
The monitoring tools are there and have been for some time. The Twitter Streaming API is designed just for this purpose and has been in production since early January of this year!
http://borasky-research.net/2010/01/06/the-twitter-streaming-api-how-it-works-and-why-its-a-big-deal/
8:36PM on 10th September 2010
It amazes me that Twitter has taken this long to incorporate built-in metric measurement and traffic analysis tools into their own product. Up to now, other third party entities (HootSuite, just to name one) have been doing this job for them, which, to me, seems like a huge missed opportunity. I hope this trend of incorporating metrics continues so they can take ownership of everything Twitter can ultimately be, rather than letting third parties fill in the hole!
4:57PM on 16th December 2010
Interesting read-Thanks for sharing
2:10PM on 31st March 2011
The growth in measurement is huge! everybody wants to be able to measure their ROI when using Social Media. The reality is that even with the ability to track links and the myriad of applications available that can help, the end results can still be a bit wishy washy. Perhaps there is still room for intuition when trying to gauge how successful a tactic. This is not to say that we should forget about measurement, just to point out that it is not the be all and end all.