Twitter Expert

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The shortening service tr.im is closing down, for want of a business model:

Of the url shortening services:

Tinyurl.com is the big daddy of them all, and generates a large amount of traffic even to its own site, but as far as I am aware even that is a spare time project, which now runs in “maintenance mode”.

Bit.ly has been best of breed for some time by providing a portfolio of statistical services, and other features.

ow.ly is the in house shortening service at Hootsuite, which is established as the leading service for managing multiple Twitter accounts.

I think there is an analogous lesson for another zero monetary cost but time-sink activity - blogging.

As a bolt-on commentary or marketing channel, whether to a consultancy business, a political career, or as a “proof” of ability as a writer, blogs add enormous value; as a standalone platform, they can be a time (and therefore money) pit.

This is a very quick tip that adds value while taking up no time at all.

If you use the bit.ly service to shorten your links on Twitter (or for any other purpose), you can just insert /info/ into the url to get a graph of how many clicks there have been.