Twitter has just announced that to protect people from scams, links in direct messages and sent via email will be shortened using its own URL shortener. It’s a welcome move. Still, I was curious about any impacts this might have for good marketers who are not trying to scam people. Good news, on that front.
To test things, I sent myself two direct messages from the @smx account that I oversee to my personal account at @dannysullivan. The messages had these links in them:
When these links arrived as direct messages, as viewed through the Twitter site, they were unchanged. Nothing had been altered. My understanding is that links WILL change in direct messages in the near future, however.
When Twitter emailed me these messages, the links within them had been shortened as follows:
From a marketing perspective, I wondered whether Twitter was stripping out my own URL shortening entirely. If so, I potentially lost important tracking information as well as link credit.
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