by Tegan Jones, editor

Many news stations have taken up the cause of social media marketing, religiously posting links on Twitter and Facebook. But few know how much traffic this incessant linking really creates. Fewer still have hard evidence about where, when and how frequently they should be posting to their accounts.

Even the experts are still debating best practices around these issues—and whether today’s best practices will be valid tomorrow. But, until a solid social media business model emerges, one up-and-coming tool can help stations learn a little more about their links’ private lives.

Bit.ly, a URL shortening tool, helps users fit links into 140-character Facebook and Twitter posts. While this service is hardly new, the tracking options this site offers has recently created a stir among companies looking to monetize their presence in the online social sphere.

By allowing users to log in and save the links they’ve shortened, bit.ly creates a vast repository of the information they’ve shared over time. With all this data in one place, users can return to their links hour after hour to see which have received the most click-throughs and how viewers were delivered each link.

For instance, by clicking the ‘info’ tab under posted links, users can watch minute-by-minute updates of the number of views their links have received, giving them an impression of what time frames drive the most link traffic. They can also see whether viewers received the link through Facebook, Twitter or e-mail/instant message, to gauge the effectiveness of different delivery methods.

Unfortunately, these metrics are still on the light side, providing little geographic or demographic information that would be useful for news stations. But it can provide assurance that social marketing efforts aren’t being wasted—or let stations know they need to try something new.