We see Bitly links every day. To prove this decided to perform a quick experiment where I would scroll my social media to see how long it would take for me to come across a Bitly link. It took me a whole 10 seconds……
Some website links or URLs (uniform resource locators) are very long and take up a lot of space on a website. Bitly is a service that is referred to as a“URL shortener,” which means it can act as a middleman and take long URLs and shrink them into much smaller ones. This can be especially popular on microblogging sites such as Twitter due to the social network’s 140 characters per post limit.
Bitly is not just a link-shortening tool, it can also provide useful analytics on the links you add to your posts. It can become a powerful online marketing tool used to track clicks, see site referrals and get an idea of which geographical locations most clicks are coming from.
How to Use Bitly for free
- Visit the Bitly website – https://bitly.com/ and select Get started for free
2. Select the fee account. You can create up to 5 links per month using the free account.
Other Things To Know About Bitlinks
• You can not only track the geographical location of the people clicking and sharing your Bitlinks but also view some of their demographic information. This is all possible when you sign up for a Bitly account.
• Another advantage of the premium account is that you can customize your Bitlinks with letters or words that are easy to remember, instead of relying on the random letters and numbers generated automatically by Bitly. However, it has to be an unused bitlink.
• Bitlinks are incredibly useful beyond Twitter. You can also use them on emails or posts so that your links do not break over two lines and become unclickable. They also look nicer on printed documents or images or where you do not have enough space to write the whole URL.
• If you are not sure whether a bitlink is safe to click on, simply add a plus sign to the end of the bitlink. This will allow you to preview the linked page without actually going there.
