The Value of Bit.ly for Social Media Users

Bit.ly-Benefits

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You might use or at least know Bit.ly as a handy tool to shorten long website names – URL’s – such as this posts’ web address from
https://www.savvybookwriters.com/the-value-of-bit-ly-for-social-media-users/ to http://bit.ly/1VobeLO.

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When a reader clicks on the Bit.ly shortened version, they are then redirected to the original long URL.  Most important: when search engines find links to your short URL’s, they will credit those links to the long URL – a great SEO benefit for your web page.  More than 800 million links are shortened every month and there are more than 10 billion clicks from 2 billion unique people on those links.
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Statistics for Enterprises.
But that’s not all: Bit.ly provides valuable statistics for each of your shortened URL’s in tweets and other Social Media posts. Last year they introduced a new analytics feature that gives enterprise customers a picture of how their content is being shared across the full Bitly network.
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More Than URL Shorts.
The tool offers enterprise level Bitly Brand Tool customers insight into how consumers interact with content shared using Bitly’s popular link-shortening service.  Most notably, the feature isn’t limited to data about links that brands or publishers share themselves, but also provides information from the full Bitly network.
Useful statistics (see the screenshot above) – here are some examples:

  • Number of times your shortened URL was clicked on
  • Number of times other Bit.ly shortened versions of the same page were clicked on
  • Referring sites / applications from which your shortened URL was clicked
  • Country of the users who are clicking on your shortened URL

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Learn From Your Statistics.
This way you know how successful your tweet or post is, which site brings you the most visitors and from which country they came from.
For example, if you get most referrals from Twitter, just because you tweet the most links there, and you have the most followers on Twitter, you might decide to post a bit more on Google+ and invite more people into your circles on Google+ or you might improve the number of followers on Facebook or LinkedIn.
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Tweet and Post Via Bit.ly.
A marvelous reason to use Bit.ly is for me the fact, that I can post to several Twitter and Facebook accounts with ONE click. For example: I just wrote a blog post with an endless long URL, which I then copy / paste into the small window on top of the Bit.ly site.  Immediately an almost perfect tweet is created in front of my eyes and I can send this tweet / post – to all the previously set-up Social Media accounts – with ONE single click!
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Mobile Deep Linking:
Bit.ly explains that “the majority of web engagement now takes place on mobile devices. Mobile users spend 86% of their time on apps.  By enabling deep linking (direct link to a certain post or article) as part of Bitly Brand Tools, marketers are becoming mobile marketing superstars without any additional code required, plus they can utilize this across their paid marketing efforts and across their audience’s organic sharing efforts as well.”  Bit.ly will redirect to the app if the user already has the app, or send them to the app store if they don’t. Check out this video, explaining deep linking: https://vimeo.com/141418088

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Sure, links can be shortened directly by Twitter, and there are other websites that shorten links, such as http://Ow.ly, http://Hootsuite.com, or http://tiny.cc.  But none of them offers Bit.lys useful advantages and valuable statistics, which allow social media users to determine on which site to spend their time and effort.  Bit.ly is – for these reasons – THE most popular link shortening service on the web!
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