Su.pr is the new URL shortening service from StumbleUpon. Currently its in private beta, but I’ve been lucky enough to get an account and have been test driving the tool for the past week.
Su.pr has the potential to change the way you share and promote your content and hints at the promise of delivering a whole new stream of traffic. Does it live up to the hype? Check it out:
Shortens and Posts to Twitter + Facebook
Obviously su.pr will shorten urls and yes they end up being nice and short thanks to the tiny (su.pr) domain name. It will also post your URL to Twitter and Facebook. Nothing new here….but read on.
Scheduled Posts
Want to spread out when links are posted to Twitter or Facebook? Su.pr includes an option to schedule links in the future. Great for promoting future blog posts, events and launches.  There are tools that do this on Twitter already, but integrating with a url shortener is a ncie and smart touch.
Stats
Su.pr comes with powerful and feature-rich stats tracking.  See exactly who is retweeting your content, traffic sources as well as details on who’s “liking” your content on StumbleUpon. All of this is put into a nice graph and is available for download. Sure others have stats, but lets move onto a killer feature…
Suggested Posting Time
This feature has the potential to make you look like a social media pro as it figures out the best time for you to post your links on Twitter and Facebook.   Su.pr automatically calculates this based on performance of past links. This really is a killer feature and could mean the difference between your post being picked up and going viral or bombing.
Short URLs on Your Domain
So su.pr is sounding pretty good right now. But wouldn’t it be cool if you could host short URL’s on your own domain like “task.fm/asf” ! Good news. Su.pr does that too. I have heard of hosted solutions that charge big $$ to do the same thing!
Down and Dirty Details
So does su.pr live up to the hype? Does it deliver more “traffic” compared to if you used another URL shortener? Absolutely yes.
See, Su.pr automatically promotes your other content to the user. For an example just follow this link: http://su.pr/6ED6cu – see how it frames your post, links to your other articles and allows for easy sharing.
I was sceptical but the stats don’t lie. The combination between Stumbleupon, Suggested posting times and facebook posting does the trick. Su.pr is onto something. Something that others like Digg are trying to do as well.   But Su.pr works.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
nice!! i like the suggest when to post part. It would really help us get the maximum traffic when the content gets posted. A nice feature and im sure this url shortener is here for long.
Timesvr.com
Yeah Casper, I don’t think this URL shortener is likely to disappear like some of the smaller ones, seeing as its from StumbleUpon.
I tried to get the site-specific URL shortening stuff to work for about an hour tonight, but I couldn’t pull it off. I think this particular aspect is a little buggy right now. (Judging from feedback in the support forum)
Also, I was disappointed that it doesn’t allow you to use your own domain as the DEFAULT for the shortening, it only uses your domain when you are shortening a link on your own domain. Bah.
thanks for the great walk through. i feel like a moron asking, but i can’t seem to get my site in the su.pr/settings page to sync at all with the wordpress installation. did you run into any difficulties? Do you have any ideas? Thanks! And I apologize if there is was a double post.
Solved my own question. For anyone having trouble w/ this… you must use Su.pr to create a shorturl, click through to your own page, and then thumbup one page before su.pr will be able to sync w/ your site. enjoy.