I've been spending some time on Twitter and Facebook recently and have started using a service called Bit.ly to shorten the long urls which link to my hubpages articles.

Step 1 Sign up for an account at www.bit.ly

Step 2 Copy the Hubpage links you would like to track and shorten into the bit.ly system

Step 3 Add your login information for twitter

Step 4 You can either copy and paste your link into twitter along with your tweet or post directly from bit.ly

In addition to shortening your long url to something under 20 or 30 characters Bit.ly has the option of adding a keyword to the short url to enable more effective tracking.

for example I've added ReikiInsomnia as a tracking keyword to track my reiki hubpage.

This also gives me the option of putting the shortened url  on a business card or in a newspaper or magazine advertisment.

The individual tracking for each URL makes it possible to track the response rate for individual insertions of  an advertisment.

There are several other services for shortening URLs available on the internet some of which I have listed below: