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, Facebook or other social networking and micro blogging websites? What if someone regularly keeps stealing your tweets, Facebook status updates and shortened links ?

This is also a type of 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 person who actually tweeted it.

Tracking the Use of Your Shortened Links On Twitter And Facebook

One good way to find out who is using your shortened links is to sign up for a Bit.ly account and use it to shorten links. Using Bit.ly’s API and online dashboard, 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.

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 to find out who is retweeting your blog posts on Twitter is to use BackTweets. All you have to do is ente the SS feed of your blog and you can figure out the Twitter profiles who are spreading content from your blog on Twitter.

BackTweets is kind of a reverse Twitte seach engine which lets you peform a site specific tweet search and lets you filte the backlinks pointing to your site. The downside here is that the free version of BackTweets.com is limited to tweets for the last 7 days only.