Tracking Twitter
Twitter’s changes last week mean lots of marketers – anyone with a social dashboard should see a change.
In short, as of last Wednesday all links (longer than 20 characters) posted on Twitter.com or any Twitter client are now marked with a t.co URL. As NextWeb says, “this means all analytics tools are picking up t.co as the referrer as opposed to a particular twitter client (Twitterrific, Tweetdeck etc.) or just twitter.com”.
Now Twitter should get the attribution it deserves. Not that this is the reason Twitter is using. They say Twitter uses the t.co domain as part of a service to protect users from harmful activity, to provide value for the developer ecosystem, and as a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting Tweets.
Super. The real rub though is that marketers will now get to see the impact and influence of the entire Twitter ecosystem – a key metric given so many posts and links don’t occur on Twitter itself.
NextWeb has a great overview.
