Why You Need A Bit.ly Account

Most people using tinyURL or bit.ly are doing it primarily for one reason: making tweets shorter.  In fact, anyone who has spent time using a tool like tweetdeck (now working well as a native Chrome browser app) may possibly have discovered hypershortened URLs (pronounced "Earls" not "You Are Elles").  if you don't know what a tweet is or have never benefitted from the traffic or highspeed insight of twitter... then welcome to the interwebs.  This article may not be for you.

If you are still with me, I want you to be aware of one of the more underrated benefits of using a tool like bit.ly: tracking link traffic.

Let me lay out a scenario for you.  I am going to use my blog as an example. I have friends who read my blog simply because it is there.  They know the address and so they go read it or they watch the feed on the facebook ePost blog page.  In any case, if I write a new blog then they may be finding it by those two sources.  Then there are the people who find me via my tweet post. And I use Tweetdeck which posts my tweet to facebook, linkedIn and Twitter simultaneously. What if I want to seperate that audience from the people who visit my blog and my facebook page? basically, I want to only see the traffic to my blog articles from my social network tweets only!  Here is where having a bit.ly account differs from simply using TweetDeck or visiting tinyURL without having signed up.

Firstly, signing up is free, so just go do it.  Secondly. Once you sign up you can customize the shortened URL (OK, to be fair you don't have to sign up to benefit from this feature, but you do have to get out of TweetDeck and visit the bit.ly site.)  For example, when I shortened the URL for this page I got the new address http://bit.ly/Mc07RtD which to some people might look like a scary URL to a virus or Phishing attack site.  By visiting the site I was able to transform that URL into http://bit.ly/WhyBitlyAccount which looks a bit more legit.  Next up, as a member I am able to track the hypershortened URLs as a click-through.  What is a click-through, you ask?  A click through is an address that is simply there to load another address so you can track the traffic to that click-through link separately. Why would you do this?  Well, referencing my example here, I need to see who is hitting my blog page, but only those coming from my tweet out to the social network specifically. And only the people clicking on the link in the tweet are going to hit that click-through link, so here is where bit.ly helps me out.  As a member I can see my generated hypershortened URLs and this allows me to track the traffic that hits my blog page from the bit.ly link only!

You are starting to do the math now.  Do you run an e-newsletter? Do you want to track all of the traffic to your content coming only as a result of the e-newsletter?  Well, one free way to do that without creating your own click-through pages is to signup for a free bit.ly account and start tracking your links!