Social Media Tools Review: Bitly

by Rosemari

 

The problem

Long urls are cumbersome.  They disrupt precious white space in the body of an e-mail and are difficult to share, particularly in a world where character length of updates from sites like Twitter and Facebook matter.

How Bitly solves it (or attempts to solve it)

Bitly is a service used to shorten lengthy urls.  Additionally, if you register for a Bitly, you are able to track how many clicks your specific link retrieves and information about who is clicking on those specific pages. 

According to the “About” section of the Bitly website, “bitly helps you collect, organize, shorten and share links. We are currently reinventing how people discover and share content on the web.” Let’s see how this could apply to a real world scenario.

Scenario

For example, let’s say your organization wants people to check out the new a new video on your main website. You can send a social media update that lists your traditional url to get to your website in order to access the video. However, you will not have the capacity to determine if the traffic on your site is due to the video or another factor (perhaps people looking on the website for details regarding an upcoming event, etc.).  Bitly allows you to share a unique link that will show you the number of clicks specifically for the video.

Additionally, let’s say you are trying to determine who is the best spokesperson for your organization via social media. You can have various Bitly links being pushed to by different handles, including your agency handle, your CEO, and your community mobilizers, to determine what handle is most effective and which audiences are most interested in your video. 

Once you’ve pushed your link, you can track how many clicks occurred in various time frames (some options are “total,” “past hour,” “past 24 hours,” etc.). It also allows you to see the platform individuals using to click through (for example, Facebook, Twitter, Direct, etc.) to your video as well as the countries they are clicking from.  These types of benchmarks are similar to the metrics available using Google Analyzer.

Other features

Bitly offers free account that allows you to shorten and share, create custom hash tags, have an individual link statistics page and single tracking domains.  Bitly also offers a vanity account called BitlyEnterprise for $995 a month that offers additional features, such as multiple tracking domains, “end-to-end branding,” and no rate limits. Organizations and companies like Pespi and CSPAN have custom links such as pep.si and cs.pn.