Home»Archive for March, 2010

Are All URL Shorteners Created Equal?

Mar 18th, 2010 Comments Off

URL shorteners are a great way to add links to social media profiles and monitor the traffic that clicks through.  But what if your link shortener didn’t work?  What if by choosing the wrong service you lost clicks, clients, and potential revenue?  Web analytics firm WatchMouse decided to put the URL shortener services to the test.  Here are there results:

On the positive side:

  • URL shorteners obviously provide useful features like making a long URL shorter (i.e. so it fits easily in a Twitter message)
  • They enable you to track and analyze clicks on a specific short URL
  • Some URL shorteners like twt.tl also provide some browsing safety by analyzing the target URL for harmful website code or phishing attempts

But on the negative side, URL shorteners also introduce:

  • An additional single point of failure: when a URL shortener service is down (or corrupt) the link won’t work
  • Additional load time for a page to fully load

WatchMouse monitored the most popular URL shorteners for one month to find out how they are doing in terms of availability and speed. During that time we monitored 14 URL shorteners and collected the uptime and performance statistics. The uptime results are shown in the chart below:

Based on the results, the fastest, most reliable shortener is Google’s goo.gl.  Twt.tl is a close second.  youtu.be has the fastest overall speed, but isn’t as reliable as the first two. The worst? Facebook’s fb.me.  Steer clear of that one.

Fortune 100 Social Media Practices

Mar 11th, 2010 Comments Off

The power of social media is undeniable.  The major challenge entrepreneurs are faced is with answering the question: what constitutes effective social media use?  It’s easy to assume that the attention invested doesn’t have a tangible on the bottom line.  While social media doesn’t necessarily generate revenue, it does link people together.  You can get yourself, your product, and your message out there and connect with other like minded business people and potential customers.  This is the true power of social media.  Building connections.  When it comes down to it, that’s what good business is about: how well you connect with people.  Ethan Bloch of Flowtown.com recently created an info graphic showing how effective businesses, in this case the Fortune 100, use social media to connect to the world:

Ever wonder how big businesses are leveraging social media? Burson-Martseller recently released a report highlighting the Fortune Global 100 companies and how they were using social platforms including: Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We have complied a graphic illustrating the most interesting of their findings:

Read more at Flowtown

Connect with Flowtown on Facebook, Twitter

Social Media for Good: Earthquake Person Finder

Mar 1st, 2010 Comments Off

Google has recently launched a social networking utility to bring together victims of the Chilean Earthquake and their lost loved ones.  The site gives users two options 1) I’m looking for someone, or 2) I have information about someone.  Once entered all data becomes search-able, and provides a database which shelters or individuals can access to determine family’s whereabouts.  As of publication the record count is 47 thousand.

This a great example of how social media can make a real impact in people’s lives.  What are other ways social media could be used to provide aid to those who need it?