SmallBusinessNewz

Time and time again, we've talked about marketing on Twitter, and doing so remains a good idea.  If you're a little stuck on the "how," though - and particularly the "how" of "how to direct traffic to my site when tweets can't exceed 140 characters" - here are more details.

Have you heard about URL shorteners?  These nifty things take standard URLs (like http://smallbusinessnewz.com/ for a kind of petite example) and convert them into bite-size links (like http://ow.ly/kAoU).  The longer the URL, the more useful the shorteners are.

Still, since shorteners aren't of any use whatsoever when they're not in working order or make people sit around for a page to load, the Royal Pingdom blog put nine to the test.  Its conclusions: "The three fastest services in the test are Is.gd, Bit.ly and Ow.ly," and "[t]he three most reliable services in the test are Ow.ly, Bit.ly and Su.pr."

So you're probably best off using either Ow.ly or Bit.ly if you want to post links on Twitter.

We'll just leave you with one warning about URL shorteners: since they make it harder for people to see what's waiting on the other end of a link, using them may cause some virus- and malware-averse individuals to not click.