Neither Twitter nor LinkedIn track link traffic.

Twitter offers a snapshot outlining how many tweets you’ve posted, how many followers you have, and how many accounts you follow.

LinkedIn shows you the size of your network (at various steps remove); and in the case of groups, it will offer demographic and growth information.

However, if you want to know which links actually interest your readers, or how your link-performance has changed over time, you’ll need a different tool.

Bitly and Ow.ly

Bitly and Ow.ly are a pair of link-shortening services (like tinyurl.com) – but unlike tinyurl, they also track all traffic through …

Are you doing enough to track your online improvement?
Year-over-year comparisons are one of the more common ways to track business success, but not all online analytic suites are designed to support this approach.
Website (or Blog) Performance – Google Analytics

Google Analytics is great for looking at data year over year. So long as you’re only interested in data from after you installed Google Analytics, you look at traffic statistics over any period of time and compare them against any other period.

This even allows comparison of one website iteration against the next so long as …

Earlier this week I discovered that one of my best friends from college, who is now a professor in his own right, had never seen the abbreviation RT for retweet.  It was a somewhat sobering realization that even though we grew up with personal computers and Internet access, social media ken is not inherent to my generation. Finding out that a good friend, who is one of my more learned contemporaries, was operating without the base vocabulary for today’s online world inspired me to put together a quick primer of acronyms to rule the web.

Five Definitions to Start With

RT - …

What is Social Media?
Social Media is a vehicle to share information with a broad audience twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In addition to being any form of online publication or presence that allows users to engage in multi-directional conversations, it is a way to build relationships with the public. Online tools allow businesses to keep in touch with customers and easily update them on what’s new, whether it is products, services, events, an interesting insight or a new hire to the team. Basically, Social Media is the “wave of the now.”
What to know about Social Media
Social Media …

Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, LinkedIn, Flikr, Photobucket, Ning, Xanga, WordPress, …. The list of social media platforms goes on and on.  Some overlap with each other, others have no channels of compatibility, and most of the services that would allow you to synchronize the content of multiple services are annoyingly piecemeal.

Enter Ping.fm.

Ping.fm has compiled a list of 40 blogging sites, social networks, online status recorders, social bookmarking services, and photo sharing sites - each and every one of which can be updated individually or in groups from within the Ping.fm interface.

See a service you don’t yet use?  Ping.fm will …

Link building is one of the key elements to Search Engine Optimization.  The more reputable sites you can get to refer people to your site, the better your search engine results will be.  You will usually need a well known and positive reputation in order to garner such links, but there are some small steps you can take on your own to get the ball rolling.
There You Are!
I don’t know about you, but when I first decide where I want to go shopping, one of the first questions I ask myself is, “what’s near me?”  I’d be willing to bet …

What is Online Ore?

Online Ore is a new feature here at the Gold Mine, and one that has us all fired up.  Each week, on Monday morning we’ll be featuring a new site or service to improve the life or productivity of business owners or their employees.

Online or not, each of these nuggets is a tool that can be used to find value, joy, or efficiency, either inside the workplace or out of it.

So far we have featured

• Mint, a personal finance management site.
• …
  Read More…

This week’s vein of online ore can be found at http://bit.ly

Bit.ly will take any web address and shorten it to exactly 20 characters. This is especially useful when you are making a short form post like a Twitter entry or a Facebook status update, were the total length of your post is limited. However, it is also handy whenever you encounter a site with a URL more than a line long.

In addition, bit.ly tracks statistics, letting you know how many people followed your links, and whether …

One week ago a new four-colored dialog box appeared in my Gmail account.  And I don’t mean some clunky square computer dialog box that we’ve all grown accustomed to, I mean an honest to goodness comic book style dialog box.

Clearly this was some new sort of chat functionality, which surprised me, as I already had a GTalk session open.

Apparently Google was launching it’s answer to Facebook and Twitter, and you know what, I couldn’t be bothered.  I already have all the personal social media tools I need.  In fact, I have more social media tools at my disposal than I …

As Twitter continues its meteoric rise towards becoming the largest, easiest vehicle for mass personal communication, advertisers and marketers continue to experiment with how the social media tool can be monetized and/or integrated into their campaigns.

Three concerns in particular have driven these experiments: Cost, Impact, and Disclosure.

Cost

As anyone with a Twitter account can tell you, Twitter is a free service.  It costs you nothing to set up an account, and there is no charge for posting to Twitter.

However, there is another price associated with marketing through Twitter, and its coin is time.

If you wish to grow a successful Twitter presence …