Bit Link: What is a bit link?

Bitly is a URL shortening service that shortens more than one billion links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, and email. A link that is shortened by Bitly is often called a Bit Link. While many see the platform as a simple tool to make a link short enough to fit into a Tweet, Bitly is much more than that. It is the only major cross-platform sharing service tracking Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr, email and IM services. This provides a unique look into consumer behavior. Companies can also use their own custom domains to generate shortened links; for example, The New York Times uses nyti.ms. 

How to Use Bitly

The free account allows you to save and share your favorite links across the social web and provides some basic analytics tools to show you how many people are clicking on your link and on what platforms those clicks are taking place. The company offers a paid solution called Bitly Enterprise that provides more extensive branding features. Bitly Enterprise has advanced analytics features and uses Bitly data to provide advanced social insight tools for companies and brands.

Bit Link Best Practices: How to avoid having links blocked as spam

Spammers often employ link shorteners because they mask the true URL that they redirect to. This has resulted in even reputable link shorteners becoming blacklisted, since link shorteners are so often associated with spamming. If the links you provide in your emails are blacklisted, ISPs will probably block your mail, and your emails will not get through.

One way to address this concern is, rather than using a public link shortener, use your own private one. Your own branded short domain is unlikely to be blacklisted, and you can name it whatever you want. This also increases brand awareness as your brand will not be hidden behind the link you want your customers to click on.

Bit Link Metrics: Analytics in Bitly Enterprise

With Bitly Enterprise you can determine which of your content is most popular among your audience. You can see how much of the sharing is being done by your marketing team and how much is being done by other Bitly users. Bitly Enterprise also acts as a publisher for Facebook and Twitter. The platform allows you to schedule posts, view multiple accounts at once, and see historical posts and links.

Another feature of Bitly Enterpise is online reputation monitoring. You can setup searches for content related to a specific keyword and you can filter these searches by geography, domain, and referring platform. Bitly Enterpise will also send you email alerts for unexpected volume or negative sentiment around your keywords.

Analysis of Bitly data can help companies plan their content strategies. If a company’s landing page receives a number of clicks from Bitly links, Bitly can look at the sites clicked before and after the landing page to map the interest graph of potential customers. Bitly can analyze this data and identify specific web pages and interests that have statistically been associated with clicks on the company’s landing page. This data can then be used to develop a targeted ad buy across the identified websites.