Did you know that Twitter now wraps every link you tweet in a t.co short URL? I love these for many reasons. Mainly because we no longer need to care about how long our URLs are, but also because these t.co guys show up as referrers in your analytics software and they’re unique to each tweet. That means that when you see that 243 people visited your site via http://t.co/zdOF0Fke, you can know with certainty that it’s because they clicked the link in some particular tweet.
It’s easy enough to find that tweet by searching for the URL on Twitter, but I made a thing to make it a little easier. It’s called Tortilla.
Enter a t.co URL (or a partial t.co URL; Google Analytics gives you just the /uNiQuE bit and that works just fine here) and Mark Wunsch’s cool Twitcher library will find the tweet it’s from. Tortilla is at the mercy of Twitter search, which means you’re not likely to find a tweet that’s more than about a week old, but there’s not much we can do about that, so stay on your toes.
Now we just need more analytics softwares to trace these guys automatically. I’ve been working on that but that’s a story for another time.