Twitter Crowns Bit.ly As The King of Short Links; Here's What It Means

If you use Twitter (and who doesn't these days!) this article will be really interesting. I hadn't heard of Bit.ly six months ago and now it's being crowned the king of short links. If you take a closer look and realize what it does for users as part of the Twitter, My Space, social media, Facebook marketing craze, it makes sense.

A big part of making sense or "getting" social media for business is in the ability to pull useful data out of sharing by people through those little 140 character tweets, and in analyzing pages and resulting traffic generated on websites and blogs.

The tweets are great by themselves, and people make a lot of great connections by using these services. There are all kinds of games and apps that make these services fun, a real past time. But as a business, you miss a lot if you don't look past the surface to examine what happens to your bottom line by engaging in social media each and every day. Are you reaching the right people, and are you getting the results you want?

Not only does Bit.ly shorten the URLs used on Twitter and other services, it also creates a redirect from the shorted link out to a longer link on any web page. Along the way the service analyzes the page being linked to, pulls out the key concepts discussed on that page, and then provides real-time statistics about where the link is being shared and how many people are clicking on it. I'm a newbie to social media, but that sounds pretty impressive to me. And you just thought it was a convenient way to send your Tweets? I know that I'll be using Bit.ly going forward and using some of that data to enhance my marketing efforts.

Twitter Crowns Bit.ly As The King of Short Links; Here's What It Means