When it comes to social media - Bitly saves the day!
March 23, 2016
When it comes to social media - Bitly saves the day!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Bitly
In a social media capacity we use Bitly to shorten links so that we don't take up character space in our posts. Especially on Twitter, characters are at a premium, so being able to use Bitly to make our URLs the smallest number of characters possible allows us to deliver better messaging to our audience. Our entire marketing team also uses Bitly to shorten links for email blasts and other marketing materials. Bitly allows us to create more aesthetically pleasing content by eliminating long, cumbersome URLs. We also have opted to use a branded Bitly link, which further ties in our brand to everything we're doing.
- First, the obvious - it shortens links. Not only that, but you can customize the links so that each one is easy to manage and identify. The customization aspect is definitely a huge plus since it's easy to start drowning in lots of indistinguishable URLs.
- The analytics portion of Bitly is also great. You can garner insights for each link you create like how many clicks the URL has, where the visitors are coming from, and identify trends in traffic behavior.
- Searchability - Bitly saves each link you create and you can easily search for them using key words. If you need to pull up a link you used months ago, all you have to do is search for it in Bitly and it will come up.
- One thing I've noticed is that if you're shortening a link that you didn't create - for example shortening the link to a news article that you then want to share on Twitter - the analytics will continue to pull data from the original URL as a whole, and not just your unique Bitlink. It would be nice to be able to pull out the traffic that just my efforts are pulling to the site, and not every single source of traffic that site is getting.
- Paying for a branded Bitly link makes all of our branding look tighter and more cohesive. We promote so many links a day and that extra level of customization is great for keeping a consistent look and feel to all of our content.
Using Bitly
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Link shortening and customizing - It's simple: Paste the link into a box, watch it get shortened, rename it, and move on.
- Search - Just search for a keyword or tag in the search box and you're off. As easy as Google.
- The analytics can be a bit clunky. I wouldn't 100% rely on Bitly's analytics to gain insights from your promotional efforts.
Yes, but I don't use it