Including links in our Twitter posts can take up most of the 140 characters allowed - find out how to shorten your links using bit.ly and track them to see how many people are clicking.

1. Shortening & Tracking Links
Karen James
Cloud VA
http://www.facebook.com/cloudva
Karen James - Cloud VA

2. When you want to share a link to an interesting article
via Twitter sometimes the link is far too long!
http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

3. http://bit.ly is a very useful tool that can save you
characters and you can track how many people are
clicking on it
Sign up is simple – just enter a username, email
address & password
http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

4. This is what it looks like once you’ve signed up and
signed in
http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

5. Copy the url of the page you want to share with
people
http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

6. Paste it into the ‘shorten your link’ box in bit.ly
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid
/5459/Small-Businesses-That-Blog-Have-102-
More-Twitter-Followers.aspx
http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

7. This will automatically shorten your link
http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

8. Click ‘Copy’
http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

9. Paste the link into your Twitter post
The shortened link gives you more room to say
something about the article and still have characters
left over for re-tweeting!
http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

10. You can also track how many people click on your link.
Scroll down the bit.ly page and you’ll see a list of your
shortened links with numbers next to them
The ‘5’ means five people have clicked on the link you posted and the
‘5,400’ is the number of people in total who have clicked on other links
to that page from various places around the internet
http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

11. Clicking on each of these figures in turn brings up a page
that shows you which sites these links were clicked from
and which countries those people were in
http://www.facebook.com/cloudva

12. Great for shortening your links and finding out which links
people find most interesting
Hope you found that helpful 
See you soon
Karen
Author of 365 Social Media Tips
http://www.facebook.com/cloudva