Hits on shortened links?

[cozimek]

Hola folks,

We’re building an integration that allows us to track the number of times someone clicks a link Twitter has shortened. Unfortunately, even when we publish the tweet on a private Twitter account, with no followers, in which no human has ever clicked the link, we’re seeing that from the moment we post the tweet, at least 3-5 clicks almost immediately happen. Obviously, this skews our data collection for the number of times someone is clicking a link. Might you shed some insight as to why this is happening, and if it’s predictable, we’d like to just minus-out your auto-clicks.

Is Twitter indexing links on private accounts? Maybe requiring a number of hits on the links to shorten them?

Cheers!

[cjmcguinness]

Do you get the IP address of the clicks? It could just be Google doing indexing or some other automated process.

[cozimek]

Good question, I’ll need to grab those IPs. Right now its linking to a CRM service that’s tracking the number of clicks on the link, and when posting on a private (no followers) twitter account, we’re seeing a minimum of 3 clicks on the link within a few seconds of posting the link on the twitter account.

Time to look for some IP address sources.

[niall]