How to Find Who is Stealing Your Shortened Links or Tweets
Content theft is everywhere, some people just scrap content from your blog or RSS feed and in the worst case – they don’t provide any credit to the original article. But what about content theft in Twitter ? What if someone regularly keeps stealing your tweets and shortened links ? It’s content theft, isn’t it.
Before I go further, let me clear that “Retweets” do not fall under “stealing tweets”. A tweet is said to be stolen if someone copies the entire tweet including the short URL, tweets it under his name and provides no credit or attribution to the one who actually tweeted it.
If you use Bit.ly to shorten links, you can track who is stealing your Bit.ly links and tweets in a matter of seconds. To begin the tracking, first copy the 5 digit short code of the original URL (e.g http://bit.ly/abcde). Then go to http://bit.ly/info and paste the 5 digit URL characters. (e.g http://bit.ly/info/abcde).
Update: As pointed by Pavan in the comments section, using Bit.ly/info will not work, you will have to use the shortened URL shortcode like – bit.ly/info/xyz. Thanks Pavan.
Bit.ly will show you details on who shortened that link, how many click through’s were received and what are the conversations surrounding that topic.
Bit.ly Links
Another way is to use BackTweets but it is limited to tweets for the last 7 days only. Thanks to ManiKarthik for the tip.
http://bit.ly/info site is redirecting to http://arbitrarian.wordpress.com/
pls check and update the status
Thank you Pavan for your comment. I have updated the post