bit.ly

Sun viral video started with Twitter paid advertising

December 1, 2009 By Dan Thornton

UK newspaper The Sun is getting plenty of online coverage for a viral video it has created to capitalise on the interest in Apple’s rumoured tablet computer. But what noone has mentioned is that the seeding started with paid Twitter advertising from Be A Magpie (referral link)…

And I know that because I’ve been running paid Twitter advertising for a while as a test, and spotted it in my approval queue early yesterday, which then got picked up first by Paid Content UK.

Searching Twitter for the bit.ly link shows that 4 other people are using Magpie and beat me to place the advert, as they all used the same text, same ‘ad:’ disclosure, and all posted via the API. And then the link started to take off around 22 hours ago, coinciding with it starting to appear on more and more websites and blogs.

Partly this is down to the advert itself being worthy of comment/repeating. See it for yourself:

But it’s also interesting that The Sun (Or whichever agency/affiliate placed the Magpie advert) is now using paid Twitter advertising – previously the majority of all advertising has been for technology products (with one charity popping up as a one-off).

You can see it’s got around 1457 total clicks today by appending the identifier on the bit.ly url on your own bit.ly info page. And considering the going rate of paid Twitter advertising at the moment, I’d love to know exactly what they’ve paid, but I’d assume it’s been pretty cost effective judging by the prices I’ve seen, and the fact it got picked up by websites following on from the tweets.

The question is whether this was sanctioned by The Sun itself, and whether we’ll see more and more mainstream brands starting to use paid Twitter adverts in addition/instead of using their own accounts or trying to earn Twitter mentions?

In The Sun’s case it definitely makes sense, as their accounts are RSS feeds with less followers than my individual account! e.g. The Sun News, The Sun Bizarre, The Sun Football.

Looking at linking and short urls on Twitter

January 6, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Cli.gs, a short url service with analytics, has released stats and analysis of 10.2 million tweets and 2 million links to see which domains are most used.

Unsurprisingly Tinyurl leads the way as the default shortening service automatically provided by Twitter.

Interestingly the data scrape being analysed contains data from 8 million users – a higher number than most people have assigned to Twitter. And from that figures comes the figure that tinyurl provides 75.09% of shortened links.

The next is is.gd with 7.67% and my own favoured choice of bit.ly in third with 4.84%.

Cli.gs itself is in a creditable 10th, with 0.35%

From all links, Twitpic is the third most popular, with blip.fm and brightkite also in the top ten.

Go and see some more interesting information at the original post on the Cli.gs blog.

More ways to shorten your urls and post links

November 18, 2008 By Dan Thornton

tr.im is the latest in a fairly substantial list of services which offer to shorten your links to make them more compatible with microblogging sites like Twitter.

After all, when you’ve only got 140 characters to play with, you don’t want to be posting a lengthy website address – and even better, many of the newer services also include tracking of click-throughs. Particularly useful for marketing professionals to see whether it was their link which got traffic to their content.

tr.im works with Twitter and Indenti.ca and will automatically update your status. It tracks stats, allows comments on your urls, and your account keeps a history of your shortened urls (You can log in with your Twitter details). One of the main ways it stands out from other url shorteners is by offering to retweet popular shortened urls – bonus traffic!

Some of the other popular url shorteners are:

TinyURL is just about the grandaddy of url shortening. It does what it says on the tin, via the website or bookmarklet.

SnipURL: Shortens URLs, allows you to see how many people have clicked on them, and has useful options including showing the long url in brackets when the shortened url is copied – handy if people might mistake your url for a phishing scam etc.

Bit.ly: I started with tinyurl but switched to Bit.ly. It keeps stats for your urls, and splits them between Twitter (seperating out individual pages e.g. those clicking from twitter.com/home and twitter.com/badgergravling, and also those from 3rd party applications. Plus it records any conversations and retweets on Twitter and Friendfeed, comments, and metadata. It’s interesting that Twitterfeed (auto RSS posting to Twitter) seems to be using Bit.ly now. And most interesting is that you can set a custom term for your shortened url address – which can only be used once, so it’s yours forever if you pick a good one!

Some that I haven’t tried, and can’t in any way vouch for, include:

Tinypic (for images).

Zurl

Curio.us

Get-URL

and many many more. Interesting several that I’d heard of appear to have folded due to a combination of problems with hosts or spammers using their service. It’s important to make sure you check who is posting a shortened url before clicking on it, just in case – and obviously be aware if the link takes you to a site requesting any type of login information.

To see all the available url shorteners we’ve encountered, check out the Microblogging tools section.