Introducing Bitly
Have you ever wanted to share a link on social media but then your post looks like this?
Check out my new website blog here : https://www.myblog.com/blog/article/check-out-my-new-website-today?id=12908309129229mm29&utm=129mmas0dsfn9pan99&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Just in case you weren't counting, 78% of that entire post was dedicated to the website link and to the naked eye, that's just ugly! This is why the URL shorteners have been growing in popularity for years.
What is Bit.ly?
Let's make this easy and copy a description straight from from Bitly: "Bitly allows you to easily shorten, share, manage, and analyze your favorite links from around the web.". So that means the long url used in the example above could be shortened into a small link that is less than 20 characters. So how does this help you?
Why should you use Bitly?
Readability
Bitly will make your links easier to read for your users by translating a link like this :
https://www.myblog.com/blog/article/check-out-my-new-website-today?id=12908309129229mm29&utm=129mmas0dsfn9pan99&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
into thishttp://bit.ly/2dE8kC6
Analytics
Bitly provides analytics on your link. So let's say you use a bitly link on Twitter, Facebook, and also sent it in a few emails. You can now track how many people clicked that link and which channel they came from. This is excellent to measure the performance of each link on different platforms.
Integration with Homesync
Bitly is now a supported add-on to your Homesync account. We've made it as easy as possible to create, manage, and analyze your bitly links. After authenticating with Bitly, you will now have the option to transform any links to bitly links when posting via Homesync.