bitly

Bitly is a popular link shortening service I've used for several years. They have a great free plan but also enterprise level features available should you need them. Bitly is useful for internal communication by allowing for short URL's which are much more practical especially when using spreadsheets. You can also have better results when connecting with other via social media. Short links are a way to save space and have your URL be less distracting so the reader's attention is focused on your message and not your ugly link. It's odd to think that a few character spaces can have an impact on your business but they can especially when using Twitter. They have their one hundred and forty character limit for their Tweets and there have been numerous times when a link shortener has allowed me to send an complete, effective branded message to my target audience because I was able to use an extra thirty or so spaces in the message with the shorter link. The website is very fast loading and your account is super intuitive and easy to use which is great. On their home page you can easily copy and paste a URL into the box much like a search bar and have a shortened URL in a click so it's nice a fast. The URL's are cool in the sense you can embed them in PDF's or anywhere online and they will always redirect to your correct URL. I love that you can just go on the website and there's a text box on the home page that you can just paste your link into and it'll shorten it automatically. And if you wanted an account on Bitly, it's completely free to sign up. The websites layout is clean and simple, which I love because it makes it so easy to navigate around. The analytic reporting is great considering it's free. You can use this in your social media marketing or email marketing campaigns to track what's being clicked and it's exact location. I find anything to do with analytics and conversions which works well and is free to have tremendous value regardless of what business software category it fits into. Bitly is one of these rare companies that offers amazing free value in that it shortens URL's which helps you engage your market and keep your audience focused while you're tracking where they clicked the link and what link it is exactly.

There's honestly not much to say in this area as there's not a lot to dislike about Bitly. I do recall a few times when Bitly links weren't allowed perhaps they've been abused by spammers so that's worth noting certainly. I've just resumed my research with this particular class of business software and because I'm interested in learning how URL shorteners affect quality of clicks, which shorteners are better than others and why, which have the best tracking and so on. I start with Bitly because it's the most well known but it's certainly not the only URL shortening service on the market.

You can't complain about the price of Bitly, it's free. I like that you can make links public or private in your settings which is useful for for promotional or private internal communication. I just integrated Facebook seamlessly so you have the option to use this app for Facebook freely which saves a few more clicks which at the end of the day, month or year adds up to a lot clicks and time saved.