Twitter Friendly Links
Thank you for using Twitter Friendly Links.
Description
So, you promote your blog posts via Twitter, huh? Me too. And those long blog post URLs, ugh! Yeah, we got rid of those using URL shortening services like TinyURL and tr.im but what about the name and/or brand? Your blog posts might be fab – very interesting to read and three thousand comments on each. But are you getting people to remember your website address in Twitter? No. Do you get backlinks from Twitter using TinyURL? No. Can you measure site statistics from TinyURL links on Twitter? No.
Link Wisely, with WordPress
Here’s a quick example:
http://kovshenin.com/wordpress/plugins/twitter-friendly-links/
Might look like this in Twitter:
http://kovshenin.com/712
Sweet huh? Here’s a features list:
- Easy to install
- Customizable shortened URL style
- Switch between 302 and 301 redirects
- You can have a list of all your posts/pages/attachments together with their Twitter Friendly URLs on one page (AJAX pagination)
- Shows the short link in the edit post/page form together with the text you can tweet out (trimmed to 140 characters) and a link to Twitter with the predefined text
- You can output the twitter friendly link in your themes using the twitter_link() function
- Compatible with Sociable, Twitter Tools, Tweet This, SexyBookmarks and AskApache Google 404 plugins
- Configurable linking relations (HTML and HTTP) for rel=shortlink and rel=canonical
- Compatible with WordPress MU and BuddyPress
- Super easy tracking with Google Analytics! Destination links are Taggable!
- You can now switch to alphanumeric links for sexy links with numbers and letters like http://example.com/s2e7
- Caching with .htaccess now available!
- Even shorter links with customizable shortlink base!
- Loads more yet to come
Screenshots
Download, changelog and other notes
Download link, changelog and other notes. Officially hosted in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory: Twitter Friendly Links. I also like when people with WordPress.org accounts vote it up ;) thanks!
Even Shorter!
The new version of Twitter friendly links includes a customizable shortlink base URL. This is used in case you want your twitter links to be on a different URL than your blog. This is useful when you run your blog on a www domain name but want your short links to be without the www to save some space. Changing the base URL is also useful when your domain is too long and you have a shorter one that you would like to use for twitter links, for instance if you own yandex.ru and ya.ru, you might host all your blog on yandex.ru, but your shortlinks would be ya.ru/123 which would redirect to the original post at yandex.ru.
Enabling this is fairly simple, no coding skills required. Both domains should use the same .htaccess file, thus you should direct your new domain (virtual host) to the same root folder as your old one.
Please supply any feedback to the comments section of this page. Pingbacks and trackbacks are appreciated too. Thanks for all your contribution.
Translations
- Turkish description by Ömer Taylan Tuğut
Shortlink: http://kovshenin.com/712
Hello!
I have just typed in the necessary information into the “Tag destination links” field (utm_source etc…) and while I know my redirects are working perfectly, where inside Google Analytics can I see if my redirections are being logged correctly?
Also… I am using a separate domain for my redirections. The separate domain has an apache 301 redirect to the same URL, but on the new domain, and then the “Twitter Friendly Links” plugin (presumably) redirects (this time with s 302) to the correct final URL (with utm_source etc… tagged on the end).
In the above situation, (a) where in Google Analytics can i find the logged redirections, and (b) which referrer gets logged in Google Analytics? Is it the original web site that the link was on (twitter, facebook, whatever), or will the referred be the short redirection domain?
I hope my questions make sense.
Thanks in advance! :-)
Richard, it may be referred by the short URL you’re using, but when tagging the link with UTM parameters, GA tags the visit differently. Use the sources page to track the visits via short URLs, they’ll come up with a 4th (5-th and so on) colour on the pie chart. Or browse to Traffic Sources – All Traffic Sources inside Analytics.
~ K.
Hello again – one more question – does the use of utm_source etc… allow you to track which shortlinks are being hit the most?
When i use “tr.im” for my shortlinking, for example, I can see which shortlinks get the most hits. Does utm_source etc… allow me to do that, or can I just see what proportion of my overall visitors were from one of my many shortlinks, but not be able to tell which one?
For example, if i have two popular pages, and i post each shortlink to twitter – will i be able to tell which page had the most shortlink clicks?
Sorry if i’ve repeated myself 3 times above – it’s a difficult concept to explain! :-)
Richard, hey no probs. Yeah, you’re able to track your shortlink visitors as well. If you tagged the incoming short links, find that source in Google Analytics (see reply above) and set the dimension to Landing Page. This will show you where, via the short links, have the visitors landed this month.
Hope that helps ;)
Any word on why the 404 screen flashes during redirect? I’ve tried EVERY combination of settings within the plugin to make it go away but it does not… ANY help would be greatly appreciated. Please see http://airceo.com/7tm for an example. I’m running on godaddy platinum hosting…
i left a comment a while back but i can’t see if you responded because it looks like you only show the last couple comments and clicking “older comments” doesn’t work. Is there an issue with your site or am i missing something?
Oh, and my previous question was that i want to use your plugin in conjunction with the Tweet This plugin but i don’t know what to put in the URL Service section of the Tweet This settings. any help would be appreciated.