I figured out that Bit.Ly which shortens URL’s and provides click tracking and referral analytics for links you broadcast on Twitter doesn’t include any tweets that contained your URL if there were hashtags in the tweet on Twitter. This made it more difficult than I anticipated to collect who tweeted out my recent contest where I am giving away free screen capture software and will affect how I think about tracking links and tweets in the future.
Example of what I am saying:
In Bit.Ly if you put in any link that was shortened in your URL bar and add a + sign after it, you can see the analytics for that shortened link. This is the http://bit.ly/9BERno+ for the link http://bit.ly/9BERno
If you scroll down to where you see “Conversations” you will see everyone who retweeted or listed your link on their tweet on Twitter (or so you would think).
What you may not have realized is that any tweet that had a #hashtag in it, won’t show up in Bit.Ly analytics, this is probably because tweets with Hashtags won’t index on Google or other search engines. This makes you question whether it is a good thing to use Hashtags in your tweets, I am starting to think it is actually a bad thing to include hashtags in tweets except in very specific Twitter trending cases where you want to be part of a trend.
What do you think about hashtags being used in Tweets, is it worth including knowing that tweets with hashtags are being excluded from real time searches and other applications?
-Dragon Blogger
