The URL Shorteners that will get you the Most (or Least) ReTweets

And how does j.mp fare in all this?

Bit.ly is the default shortener in Twitter so it kind of is a common sense finding, yes? I usually use Hootsuite. I also like to use http://cru.ms which has some advanced features to manage my campaigns. As far as RT-ability? I think content is what makes it savory... the fact that bit.ly is the most common shortener makes it the most retweeted, duh...

Correlation is not causation.

Why do you use tinyurl while tweeting when your own research shows that they are least Retweetable. I'm sure you will want to get Retweets, but I'm just curious if you are actually doing some research on tinyurl itself.

Isn't this happening because most of the services/automated robots etc use Bit.ly to track everything? Personally I like Su.pr a lot as well, since it easily integrates with StumbleUpon =)

It will show you "clicks" and "stumbles" which is very fun to see the difference in traffic coming from each of the two.

- Chris

One of the things I learned from writing an article for my blog on tr.im was that while it's pretty simple to develop and deploy a URL shortener, it's not so easy to run one that can service the spiky load created by an Ashton Kutcher or Oprah tweeted link. If retweets are skewed towards top-100 Twitterers, you might see the bias you're seeing simply because the top-100 tend to use only the shorteners that are best engineered to handle them.

Fascinating. I had no idea that Twitter's default url shortener was so effective at being the default url shortener for Twitter. This research is eye-opening. A+++++++ WOULD SWALLOW AGAIN

This is an interesting survey, because I find that my web browser (IE8) often times out on bit.ly and is.gd and I suspect that bit.ly is used so much in Twitter because, if my memory serves me correctly without checking back, it is the first option that TweetDeck offers. I find that tinyurl.com gets a much better response time through IE8. Just an observation.

On this topic Rand Fishkin has also done some research on the number of retweets and the correlation to gaining links to your site. There is a correlation, so get the retweets working for you.

Twitter uses bit.ly as its default for long urls' so its going to be the biggest. Many still put in URl's and aren't even aware of shortners, Twitter is doign the work for them. Doesn't amke the tweet any more or less retweetable though.

Bit like saying if you use IE then you'd get retweeted more, when most non tech people will use IE as it built in. ergo more retweets will come from an IE browser.

I am not sure i am keen on these url shortening devices. They could help the bad guys out there distribute malicious software. i am thinking here specifically of game forums, where most users know that domains that end with .cn are to be avoided like the plague.

I think it's indeed very dangerous to draw conclusions that there is any causality between the URL shortening service you choose and the retweets it will get. All your data tells is that people who get retweeted a lot (i.e. are popular) seem to favor bit.ly. That might as of itself be a reason to use it, for sure.

However, your title and post implies that choosing bit.ly would get _you_ more retweets, which is complete bullshit. Bit.ly is high up on that list because people who got retweeted a lot used it, not the other way round. They didn't get retweeted more because they used bit.ly, and neither will you.

I would imagine that these results are considerably skewed to favor bit.ly, seeing as there are just a sheer larger amount of bit.ly links floating around.

I compared the % of random tweets that had bit.ly and retweets that did, so sheer volume should have nothing to do with it.

Ah, okay. Makes more sense now. :)

You've essentially made the case that the link shortener used by the original author is a factor in whether that update is subsequently retweeted or not. I don't buy it. There must be something else going on here.

In your calculations did you account for messages that were inherently unretweetable -- those messages that were very close to the 140 character limit when originally authored? I would suspect that your sampling of 2 million tweets should be limited to messages somewhere under 120 characters.

Also, over what period of time were your 30 million retweets and 2 million tweets authored?

I look to your Science of ReTweets presentation that states that 1.44% of tweets are retweets. However, a similar study by Pear Analytics reports that in August of 2009, 8.7% of tweets were retweets. This is a pretty significant variance.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007238

Yeah, my retweet percentage # worried me too. That number was taken from data collected by twitter.grader.com and presented in state of the twittersphere, our sample set was 5million random Tweets.

And you raise a great point about tweets under 120 chars, thank you.

Fascinating, Dan. I've always used bit.ly because it's the first one i came across and i liked the analytics after the fact. Good to know it's a winner.

Interesting stuff, but I am speculating that the success of tweetmeme and maybe other similar services that use bit.ly is the real story here.

Very interesting, Dan. Thanks. What about secondary/ancillary networks that some of these shortners tap into--su.pr greases the skids onto stumbleupon, for instance. Which is the best package deal?

I only included the most common shorteners that exhibited some siginificant bias towards retweetability or not, so I didn't include su.pr

...but you did include su.pr, as it's listed in third place.

I'm more curious about the retweetability of shorteners from the perspective of those that track links and provide analytics, e.g. bit.ly, tr.im, su.pr, etc. Tinyurl doesn't provide analytics.

Oh, oops, I meant digg's shortener.

Dan, can you explain this a bit more? How does this information compare with a ranking of most used URL shorteners on Twitter? The late comer URL shorteners maybe more well known among twitterers or may be offered by third party Twitter apps and grease monkey scripts. I have trouble drawing a connection to something being more RT-able due to the shortener. I would understand if the point was to show which shortener is used most in RTs. Do you think that most used equals increasing your chances of being retweeted? Is bit.ly the default for a ton of services and apps? Maybe the RT says more about the content than the URL shortener. Curious if you stand by your title.

I think it's fair to say that the big reason behind this is bit.ly being the standard across many apps. Still interesting to see that the short shorteners dominate the top.

Please read this comment

You're right to point out that causation is a troublesome conclusion to draw, but in the case of ow.ly for example, it has a retweet button in the bar it puts across target URLs.
bit.ly being the default also means its typically the shortener used in the little tweetmeme badges.