Re: Use of Link shorteners on Twitter

[Ryan Lerch <rlerch@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/13/2015 10:05 PM, Brian Proffitt wrote:

On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 8:44 PM, Justin W. Flory <jflory7@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 11/10/2015 08:33 PM, Lord Drachenblut wrote:

There is one reason for using ow.ly <http://ow.ly> URL shortener and
that is it allows the person posting via hootsuite to track engagement
with a post.  I would rather see a URL shortener that is fedora branded
being used if possible.

This was the major point I was thinking of mentioning. Personally, I feel like link shorteners are only necessary if they're being utilized to collect statistics and metrics. Judging by the context of this thread, do we know who has the keys to the Hootsuite? I feel like social media engagement statistics are something that could be an invaluable resource to gauging which of our social media posts are effective and which ones aren't as engaged.

That would be me, actually (and Ruth Suehle as well). Pushing links through the ow.ly link shortener does enable us to track and follow engagements on individual tweets if we want.

Because twitter sends all links through their link shortener, this is possible to track and follow engagements via twitter's web interface too. I don't see the point of pushing all links through two different link shorteners that both track and follow engagements, especially to the detriment of the usability, consistency & readability of our feed overall.

If this *is* already happening, then the above paragraph can be disregarded. In the case that statistics and metrics are being tracked, I personally vote to abstain from using link shorteners except where information about engagements and interactions are actually being utilized.

I am not sure what the main objection here is. Aesthetics of an unshortened link seems to be one selling point, but when I look at links from some database-driven content management system sites, I don't see that as a particularly strong reason.

I have several objections. Usability is one -- the latter part of a full URL (the part that a database driven CMS may automatically produce), is of less importance than the domain, IMHO. Personally,  I know I will make a decision on what to click on based on the domain, and tend to click on shortened links a lot less. This part of the previously linked article sums this up perfectly IMHO -- http://oleb.net/blog/2012/08/please-dont-use-url-shorteners-on-twitter/#urls-have-meaning

Also, while Twitter does automatically shorten though t.co, in practice I have found that the longer the URL, the more likely someone's outdated Twitter client or poor use of Twitter RTs and MTs will mangle the URL.

I am a little unclear on what you mean here. Do older twitter clients mangle URLs when posting a tweet to the Fedora feed? or when people read the tweet on an older Twitter client. Also, aren't twitter retweets automatically generated by twitter (or most clients) when you press the retweet button? or are you talking about the old practice of prefixing "RT" in front of a copied tweet that was done before twitter implemented the retweet functionality over 5 years ago?

Shortening it first is a better practice, in my experience.

That said, using HootSuite's ow.ly is kind of sad, and whenever I can, I try to use the Red Hat-branded shortener via bit.ly. This works only on redhat.com domain sites, though, and metrics for engagement have to be tracked separately, so it's aesthetically nice, but kind of a pain, too.

This brings up another issue: consistency on our twitter feed -- some links are shortened with ow.ly, others are not. Not everyone has access to, or uses hootsuite.

regards,
ryanlerch

 

--
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7@xxxxxxxxx

 

[snip]

Peace,

Brian

--

Brian Proffitt

Principal Community Analyst

Open Source and Standards

@TheTechScribe

574.383.9BKP

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