Link Shortening
Posted on March 9, 2010
Filed Under Social Media | Leave a Comment
I’m once again blazing a trail with my social media discoveries by talking about bit.ly. Okay so short links are nothing new (in new media terms at least) and I’m not exactly an early adopter, but having jumped on the band wagon just as it’s pulling out of the station, I’ve recently started using it more and more and discovering how useful it actually is.
For those of you unfamiliar with bit.ly (or other similar’s such as tinyURL, SnipURL etc etc) it lets you shorten web links that you want to share with others. It has probably achieved a higher popularity in recent months due to applications such as Twitter that limit the number of characters you can write (140). After all when you only have 140 characters you don’t want to waste 80 of them on a web link.
But short links are much more than just convenience. What is also lets you do is track the number of clicks each short link gets. If you’re trying to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing messages then getting up to the minute statistics on the number of people clicking through to your link an be invaluable.
You can view an example of the stats it can provide at my bit.ly profile
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