How many referrals do you get when you drop a link on Twitter?
There at least three ways to track this:
1. Check your referral logs for referrals from Twitter.com. This will miss all the Twitter users who visit after clicking over from applications like Twirl, text messages, etc.
2. Using click through metrics through URL shortening services. This works well, but it creates a silo of data with a different service.
3. Set a tracking URL on the link you drop. This will allow you to use your main web analytics software to filter for that traffic.
Personally, I prefer #3. Here's what #3 shows me vs #1:
Basically, I see that Twitter delivers 3X more traffic to my site than I could measure if I relied only on domain referral traffic. This makes sense since it's well known that most people use Twitter through sites, applications, devices, other than directly through Twitter.com.
