How to Spy on People’s Twitter Clicks in Real Time (or Monitor Your Own)

Ever wonder when and how often people click on links you share with your Twitter followers? There’s an easy way to find out, and I’m going to show you here. Just be warned, it can be addictive.

From time-to-time, it can be useful to know the popularity of a link you share in Twitter. Maybe you want to know what time of day is best for sharing your blog posts. Maybe you want to test out a couple of versions of headlines really quickly. Or maybe you’re just curious about how many people really pay attention to a single tweet.

In any case, there is a really easy way to monitor how many clicks a particular link gets in real time. I’ll have you monitoring your own links (or spying on other people’s) in just a couple of minutes.

How to Watch Your Clicks

For this exercise, we’re going to focus on the link shortener known as bit.ly. Bit.ly is one of the most popular link shorteners out there, and it happens to have excellent built-in analytics capabilities. If you use a Twitter desktop client like TweetDeck, there’s a good chance bit.ly is built in.

If bit.ly isn’t the automatic URL shortener in your software, don’t worry. You can always go to bit.ly directly (no account required) and shorten your links manually. This will work either way.

Step 1: Shorten a link with bit.ly.

Step 2: Share your link on Twitter, or anywhere really. This trick works for any platform you might share your link on. Email, Facebook, tacking flyers to a telephone pole, whatever you want to monitor.

Step 3: Take your link, something like “http://bit.ly/XYZ567? and add a plus sign (+) to the end of the link, with no spaces. Now type that into your browser’s address bar.

It should look something like this -

http://bit.ly/XYZ567+

Notice down near the graph that there are different time periods you can monitor. Click on “Now” to see the clicks roll in in real time.

From a link I just posted to Twitter (not above), the graph on my screen shows that 10 people clicked on it over the past 10 minutes or so.

This is Cool, Right?

How to Spy on Other People’s Clicks

Let’s do a little digging. I noticed while doing a search on pop star Katy Perry (@katyperry) I saw many bit.ly links on her twitter page. Katy has over 2.5 Million Twitter followers as I write this.

When I pulled up the bit.ly real-time stats for Katy's link (http://bit.ly/d2gBEy+), this is what I found:

Click(s) 53 Since 7:31 AM Jun 10, 2010 EST, that's 53 clicks overnight!

Let's look at the last 3 days clicks -

Click(s) 32,684 Since Jun 07, 2010 EST, and that's just on 3 full days!

How’s that for internet celebrity power? Wouldn’t you like to be able to drive this kind of traffic to a link at your will by just typing 140 characters or less?

A Fun Experiment to Try

Here’s another one you can try. You know all those people on Twitter who have like 50k or more followers, but seem to have gotten them disingenuously?

Pull up one of their links and compare the clicks-to-followers ratio against your own, or against an internet rockstar. I’ll bet you’ll find that acquiring a bunch of followers by brute force doesn’t necessarily pay off in the clicks department.

A Word of Warning

This exercise could be useful, or it could end up being a time sink. How you use it is up to you.  Also, I know this works on bit.ly like in the example, and I’m guessing some other URL shorteners also have analytics functionality built-in, but I haven’t done the full investigation. The cool thing about bit.ly is that you don’t have to have an account with them.

Again do let me know your thoughts. To your success!