Twitter & Tiny.cc url tracking

Where's my traffic?

[Syzygy]

Not sure if this is best here or in the analytics/tracking forum...

I started playing around with Twitter recently, like a lot of people, just to see what it's all about.

One thing I've been doing is to use Tiny.cc url's. The obvious advantage being that Tiny.cc offers tracking so you can see how many times your shortened url has been clicked through. Or does it...

Apart from the fact that the rate of clicks shows me that a tweet in the wild has a life span of about 30 seconds, each time I've used this the click metrics offered by Tiny.cc bear no relation to the referrer traffic (say, 30 clicks per tweet) I see via GA, which is no more than one or two at best.

So, what happens to these supposed clicks then, and why don't they show in GA?

Syzygy

[encyclo]

Google Analytics better measures human traffic, as it is reliant on a Javascript-enabled web browser. The clicks shown by the URL-shortener metrics are most likely non-human (ie. bots).

[Syzygy]

Aha, that makes perfect sense. And I thought I was starting to do well on Twitter. Seems though that my core audience are piranha-like bots ravaging tweets in a feeding frenzy that lasts all of 30 seconds. :-)