Track Links on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn and more with wee.im

URL shorteners are becoming very common now. You probably come across them in some form or another daily when you're online. goo.gl, bit.ly and tinyurl.com are popular choices. They take long, unwieldy URLs, which tend to get mangled when sent via email and turn them into short URLs, which are easier to use. It's also a great tool for micro-blogging. For example, if you use Twitter, you're limited to 140 characters per tweet. A very long URL could easily take up 140 characters just on its own, so using a URL shortener leaves you more room for your content, while still allowing you a way to share your links.

Premium WunderCounter users will now find the URL Shortener option under the Generate HTML menu after logging in. This gives you access to wee.im (or wee), which is the WunderCounter URL shortener. wee works much in the same way as the examples above, but with the difference that it's also a click tracker. This means that when you post your custom wee links, every click can be reported back to you via your WunderCounter account.

Now, let's look at some examples.

(If you are not yet a WunderCounter user, you can get started with wee by signing up for a free trial of the Premium account.)

Twitter

Twitter gives you an idea of how many people are getting your messages in the follower count, but it doesn't give you much more than that. By using wee, you can find out how many people are actually clicking on the links in your tweets. When you look at the click numbers on your tweets, you'll have a better idea of what your followers are actually interested in. You may then use this knowledge to write tweets which people are more likely to care about.

For example, if you send a tweet which gets a very low number of clicks, you can ask yourself why nobody really bothered to follow the link you shared. Perhaps your description was too vague or uninteresting. Improve this in your future tweets to get the message out to a wider audience. This is helpful to marketers as well as anyone who uses Twitter as a social tool.

Facebook

Facebook currently does not give you a lot of options for tracking who cares about what you've posted. Profile counters did work at one point, but Facebook changes disabled that feature as early as 2008. You can use wee to track clicks on links you share in your status updates, notes or anywhere else you post on Facebook. Now, Facebook will do its best to obscure the referring URL of the click, but, like Twitter, you'll get an idea of whether people actually care about the links you're sharing.

Myspace

Myspace has traditionally been easier to track than Facebook, so using wee gives you an extra layer of functionality over your existing tracking. Track links on your profile page, in your blog posts and anywhere else you decide to share links, like messages, comments etc. Be creative!

LinkedIn

Similarly, LinkedIn doesn't give you a way to track clicks on your profile pages, but it does let you share links. Use wee to get a better idea of how successful your link sharing is.

There's More to Come

There are many other use cases for wee and I'll post about some of those in future. I'm also working on integration with TweetDeck. So, lots of stuff is in the works right now. Follow this blog for updates!