Product Reviews

Bitly: The URL Shortener For You

Posted on April 24, 2018March 16, 2023 by Jas0n

24
Apr

Bitly is a tool that can be used to shorten a websites URL. You can use bitly to save and share links from around the internet on many different channels of communication such as social media sites and emails. Bitly is the world’s largest URL shortener. Bitly does this by replacing a big link with a shorter one containing a series of numbers and letters. You can use Bitly to test your content and improve your content strategy. Bitly is a free program which offers many different advantages just for signing up for it. You can use Bit.ly service to customize your URLs. This can be used if you are wanting to market something and for branding purposes. For every Bitly link that you create it comes with its own page of statistics. On the page where you access the statistical information it shows you information such as the number of clicks that your Bit.ly link gets, the percentage of total clicks that came from the link, and the total clicks on all Bitly links that direct you to the same information or content as your link. Using Bitly you can see the performance of all the links you have shortened over an hour, day, week, or month. You can use all this data gathered from Bitly to develop a better content strategy. This works because you can see which content is getting more clicks over time. By using a bar graph Bitly shows you the amount of incoming traffic that is going to the link you have created on any given day. Like I mentioned earlier it is not just days, but hours, weeks, and months. Bitly is a great at improving your content strategy because it provides you with information to identify trends and popular stories that attract your target audience in real time. Bitly also helps you to filter stories by topic, language, social platform, and geographical area. I did mention that Bitly is free, but there is an enterprise version which is available for small and medium businesses and large enterprises and it costs $995/month. With Bitly enterprise it gives you access to the dashboard, custom bitlinks, and oneview. I am not sure why you would ever need to pay for Bitly if there is a free version of it. Bitly is used by so many people. I see it all the time as I walk around campus. I see links that people have made using Bitly because it saves space. A great example of why you should use it is when you have a limited number of characters that you can use in a social media post. When you use a social media platform such as Twitter you are limited to 280 characters. As I mentioned before a nice feature of Bitly is that you can personalize the link. In one of the pictures it shows a Bitlink that I made for Professor Przybyla’s page. I personalized the Bitlink to bit.ly/Przybyla because before I changed the link it had a bunch of letters and numbers in it. It is really easy to copy, share, and edit the Bitlinks you create. Enjoy this amazing tool!