Using a link shortener is an excellent idea because of the 140 character limit for the messages you send through micro blogging
format Twitter. The Su.pr link shortener website is sponsored by the web's most popular social bookmarking service StumbleUpon. By using the su.pr link shortener you get all the advantages of using Twitter combined with the power of using StumbleUpon to gain
traffic for weblinks that you tweet.
In order to use
shortened links generated by su.pr effectively, you need a Twitter account and some followers or friends that will retweet the link for you.
Here's how you use the su.pr site, first you need to register your user name and password. You should also register with the StumbleUpon site because the two services are not inter-connected.
Next you need the url of the webpage or blog post that you want to send in a tweet. Copy and paste the url into the box under the heading “Get more traffic with Supr”. You have two options:
- Create your tweet directly on this page. Try adding some text like “Here is a link to my latest blog post” followed the su.pr url that you just created and click the “Post” button. This will open the Twitter account authentication page.Verify your account and your post will be sent to Twitter. You can also schedule your tweet to be posted at a later date and time.
- Select “Just shorten” and you will get the shortened url, which you can cut and paste into your favorite Twitter client (TweetDeck, Seesmic, HootSuite, etc.) for distribution. You need to add some text in front of the link as mentioned in the first option.
When your tweet is launched you will see the statistics for the link you have just created. The final step will be to submit the link to the StumbleUpon community for additional traffic. Click the “Thumb Up Now” icon and a submission form will open up for you to add the page to StumbleUpon so that Stumblers interested in the topic have a chance to review and rate the webpage.
A list of the links you have shortened will provide tracking statistics. The top number indicates how many people clicked the tweet link. The bottom number indicates organic traffic from Stumblers who have StumbledUpon your page. Click either number to see a breakdown of daily tracking statistic for traffic sent to your page, which can be downloaded into an Excel file.
The su.pr site is an effective way to generate shortened URLs, send traffic to a webpage and track the results.