On 11/13/2015 10:05 PM, Brian Proffitt wrote:
On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 8:44 PM, Justin W. Flory <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 11/10/2015 08:33 PM, Lord Drachenblut wrote:
There is one reason for using ow.ly <http://ow.ly>
<http://ow.ly> URL shortener and
that is it allows the person posting via hootsuite to track
engagement
with a post. I would rather see a URL shortener that is
fedora branded
being used if possible.
This was the major point I was thinking of mentioning. Personally,
I feel like link shorteners are only necessary if they're being
utilized to collect statistics and metrics. Judging by the context
of this thread, do we know who has the keys to the Hootsuite? I
feel like social media engagement statistics are something that
could be an invaluable resource to gauging which of our social
media posts are effective and which ones aren't as engaged.
That would be me, actually (and Ruth Suehle as well). Pushing links
through the ow.ly <http://ow.ly> link shortener does enable us to
track and follow engagements on individual tweets if we want.
Because twitter sends all links through their link shortener, this is
possible to track and follow engagements via twitter's web interface
too. I don't see the point of pushing all links through two different
link shorteners that both track and follow engagements, especially to
the detriment of the usability, consistency & readability of our feed
overall.
If this *is* already happening, then the above paragraph can be
disregarded. In the case that statistics and metrics are being
tracked, I personally vote to abstain from using link shorteners
except where information about engagements and interactions are
actually being utilized.
I am not sure what the main objection here is. Aesthetics of an
unshortened link seems to be one selling point, but when I look at
links from some database-driven content management system sites, I
don't see that as a particularly strong reason.
I have several objections. Usability is one -- the latter part of a full
URL (the part that a database driven CMS may automatically produce), is
of less importance than the domain, IMHO. Personally, I know I will make
a decision on what to click on based on the domain, and tend to click on
shortened links a lot less. This part of the previously linked article
sums this up perfectly IMHO --
http://oleb.net/blog/2012/08/please-dont-use-url-shorteners-on-twitter/#urls-have-meaning
Also, while Twitter does automatically shorten though t.co
<http://t.co>, in practice I have found that the longer the URL, the
more likely someone's outdated Twitter client or poor use of Twitter
RTs and MTs will mangle the URL.
I am a little unclear on what you mean here. Do older twitter clients
mangle URLs when posting a tweet to the Fedora feed? or when people read
the tweet on an older Twitter client. Also, aren't twitter retweets
automatically generated by twitter (or most clients) when you press the
retweet button? or are you talking about the old practice of prefixing
"RT" in front of a copied tweet that was done before twitter implemented
the retweet functionality over 5 years ago?
Shortening it first is a better practice, in my experience.
That said, using HootSuite's ow.ly <http://ow.ly> is kind of sad, and
whenever I can, I try to use the Red Hat-branded shortener via bit.ly
<http://bit.ly>. This works only on redhat.com <http://redhat.com>
domain sites, though, and metrics for engagement have to be tracked
separately, so it's aesthetically nice, but kind of a pain, too.
This brings up another issue: consistency on our twitter feed -- some
links are shortened with ow.ly, others are not. Not everyone has access
to, or uses hootsuite.
regards,
ryanlerch
--
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
[snip]
Peace,
Brian
--
Brian Proffitt
Principal Community Analyst
Open Source and Standards
@TheTechScribe
574.383.9BKP
--
marketing mailing list
[email protected]
List info or to change your subscription:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
