We recently counted more than 100,000 followers on our GalleyCat Twitter feed. While the social network is filled with thousands of spam accounts, we are proud to have connected with such an engaged and inspiring readership.
To celebrate, we wanted to share a simple and free method for tracking your retweets and clicks on Twitter. It’s great way to find out what kind of articles your readers like to read–invaluable intelligence for any kind of writer.
Just follow the simple directions below to find out how people have responded to your tweets…
1. Open a free account at Bitly, a service for shortening and sharing your links on Twitter
2. Start using the website Bitly to shorten your URLs before retweeting a link to any content, from your blog post, your webpage or other websites.
3. When you want to monitor a previously shortened tweet, just enter the special Bitly URL into your browser, but include a “+” sign at the end of the shortened URL. For instance, here is a link to the shortened URL for this post: https://bitly.com/qycA4L+
4. Once you follow that link, you will be able to see how many retweets, blog comments, and Facebook shares your story earned. Using the scroll bar at the top, you can search back 24-hours, a week, a month or the total life of the particular tweet. Follow this link to see another sample.
5. You can also use this page to create a QR Code for your tweet–allowing you to share your article in real life through a digital barcode. Just grab the squiggly graphic that looks like the image embedded on the right side of this post.
6. This page will also show you graphs of where your readers live, tracking both where the referring Twitter account originated and where the people who clicked on your link live.
7. At the end, Bitly will deliver a long list of all the Twitter conversations about your tweet, so you can see what people wrote about your link as they retweeted it.
Do you have any Twitter tracking tools to recommend?