Sarah Worsham

In my effort to find or create the perfect Twitter utility, I’ve been experimenting with various url shorteners to see what kind of statistics they can give me.  Today I started playing with Tr.im and, so far, I’m pretty happy with the results.  One of my requirements is that it work with Twitterfeed, which I use to send RSS feeds directly to my Twitter account.  What I’m looking for in terms of statistics is how many clicks each url gets, and then an overview of clicks for all links.

Tr.im isn’t quite my perfect Twitter stats service, but it’s the best I’ve seen so far (other than getting some 503, service unavailable errors, which may be related to Twitter issues).  I’m able to see the clicks on up to 15 tweets – or tr.immed urls, as they call them – from the dashboard, along with aggregated country information for those tweets.

The exciting part is when you drill down into one of your tweets.  From the summary you can see the breakdown of humans vs. bots for the clicks (at least in their estimate), along with more detailed information about each of the human visitors, including location, operating system, client/web browser, and how long ago they clicked. On the timelines page, you can get a visual representation of when clicks happened for the first 72 hours (or at least you should, but it wasn’t working for me). Referrers will give you known websites that are referring to the url.  Agents shows a breakdown of visitor browsers and operating systems (platforms) and the locations page will give you a breakdown of click location, similar to the summary (although now it includes bots).

Tr.im, which is part of the Nambu network (a twitter client, currently for Mac and iphone), also offers some additional features, including a Firefox extention, a Mac dashboard widget, bookmarklets, and ubiquity scripts. For Mac users, the dashboard widget is a really nice addition which frees up a tab in your web browser.  I’ve only been using Tr.im for a few hours, so we’ll see how it handles my tweets throughout the day – and whether something better catches my eye.

Technorati tags: social media, twitter, business, trim, marketing

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