Twitter is great. You can keep in touch with friends, keep abreast of the latest breaking news, and much more. Sometimes you want to share a url with your followers as part of a tweet, but the limitation of 140 characters can put an end to that quickly.  Don’t worry though, there are several tricks you can use to get around this limit.

bit.ly remedies the 140 character problem by taking a long url and shortening it to under 20 characters. Not only does bit.ly perform this task, it provides analytic data on each bit.ly link a registered user creates. This is a great way of keeping track of your tweets and how many times the links within them have been clicked. You see the number of clicks the full url gets vs. how many clicks came directly from your tweet. This data is invaluable for social media enthusiasts and even the casual Twitter user, because it helps provide a sense of what is grabbing the public’s attention, what isn’t, and to what degree this is happening.

Give it a try, you might find it will enrich your Twitter experience significantly.