t.co v/s third party URL shortening services

Twitter's new URL shortening service has made sharing the links an easy affair. You don't need to go to a third party shortening application to shorten your links. This naturally saves time.However I found a shortcoming of this service.

When you shorten a link using t.co,you can't track the clicks.

Tracking the clicks is a healthy habit for every twitter user. It lets you know your true reach (even more than re-tweets). Also, for bloggers it is a necessity to know how many real-time clicks they get for the links the post (this info. is provided by the blogging services like blogger etc.).

The best part of third party shortening services is that they give you a complete history of clicks. Hence,it is quite a useful affair to shorten links using these services. A few of the shortening services are:

• Bit.ly
• goo.gl
• ow.ly
• su.pr
• tinyurl.com (You can add it to browser's tool bar and also use custom alias)

Its good to be consistent with one of these service as you'll readily get a reference and compare which of your links/at which time your link got highest clicks.

All The Best.