Five Basic Bits About bit.ly

I love aggregators. I love metrics. I love aggregators with built-in metrics. I believe that the future of social media is in aggregators with sophisticated metrics—one-stop shopping, if you will.

Miller Littlejohn, in an interview for a Mashable article on the future of social media said,

"Right now, the most important tools are the broadcasting tools … But in five years, the most important tools will be the monitoring and measurement tools — the tools that can tell you what happened to your message once it got out there. [T]he tools that can demonstrate (and quickly demonstrate) return on engagement will be winners.”

When it comes to defining reach, one of the better tools in my toolbox right now is bit.ly, a URL shortener used by Tweet Deck and others. Here are five bits you’ll want to know about bit.ly (Hootsuite has the same services attached to their owl.ly URL shortener, if you are a Hootsuite user).

1. You’ll need a bit.ly account. You have three options (see #5) I’ve signed up for the free pro service because I have a custom domain. The basic free service does not require a custom domain. Just go to http://www.bit.ly/ and sign-up. You’ll need to provide them with your twitter account name.

2.  Use it in all posts where you use a URL. If I am doing a press release with an embedded URL, I get a shortened URL from bit.ly first so I can track the reach of that URL. Same for any online publication.

3. Use the Sidebar Bookmarklet. The bit.ly sidebar bookmarklet shortens URLs on any webpage directly into whatever you are working on. It shows related link traffic, “conversations,” and history. The bookmarklet will track your bit.ly links on Twitter, Gmail(add the gadget), and Facebook as well. I like the conversations section for tracking comments on blog entries that I post using the bit.ly shortener. The number of comments show up on the dashboard in the conversations section attached to that particular URL.

4. Go beyond the basics. Bit.ly has a number of detailed metrics you can use triggered by particular tags on the URL. There is a learning curve but I think the investment of time is worth it to get the deeper metrics from your URLs. See the FAQ page for lots of additional info.

5. Bit.ly has three levels of service, depending on what you want. The basic service is free, the Pro version is for those who have a custom domain and provides more metrics, is also free. The Enterprise solution costs $995/month. The differences between the three can be seen here.

Are you using any URL metrics? If you’re a Hootsuite user, how do the two compare?