bitly blog

Time Is On Your Side

Did you see those silly cats on Tumblr, that breaking news on Twitter, and those photos of your friend’s kids on Facebook? Different social networks have their own distinct personalities. Bitly links are shared across all social networking services, giving us a unique viewpoint on how these networks differ.

We track metrics like the main type of content being shared on a network, the geographic locations of the people sharing and viewing the content, and how the popularity of the network has risen and fallen compared to other networks. Studying the differences between these networks leads us to interesting insights, for example, did you know that the half-life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours?

Recently weʼve been exploring how content propagates (or “goes viral”) through social networks, particularly how the day and time something is posted affects the eventual amount of attention it will receive.

Note: All the plots are based on EST. You will see day of the week, starting with Monday, on the Y axis, and hour of the day, starting with midnight, along the X axis. For the first plot in each section, the darker the blue block, the more traffic on average links posted during that hour received in the following 24 hour period of time. White blocks, show when links got less traffic. For the second plot, the darker blue represents when the site is most active, which we calculate based on number of clicks on Bitly links coming from these social platforms.

Links posted from 1pm to 4pm result in the highest average click throughs. The peak time of the week was on Wednesday at 3pm. Links posted after 8pm and before 8am will have more difficulty achieving high amounts of attention. As with Twitter, avoid posting on the weekends.

Facebook traffic peeks mid-week, 1 to 3pm. While traffic starts to increase around 9am, one would be wise to wait to post until 11am. Traffic from Facebook fades after 4pm. Despite similar traffic counts at 8pm and 7pm, posting at 7pm will result in more clicks on average than posting at 8pm.

Tumblr

Tumblr likes to party! This network shows a drastically different pattern of usage from Facebook and Twitter. One should wait until at least 4pm to post. Also postings after 7pm on average receive more clicks over 24 hours than content posted mid-day during the week. Friday evening, a no-man’s land on other platforms, is an optimal time to post on Tumblr.

Bitly traffic from Tumblr peaks between 7pm and 10pm on Monday and Tuesday, with similar traffic on Sunday.

Conclusion

It’s easy to see that just like your neighborhood restaurants, each social network has its own culture and behavior patterns. By understanding the simple characteristics of each social network, you can publish your content at exactly the right time for it to reach the maximum number of people.

Race, Guns and Attention

On February 26th, Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman in Sanford, FL. Martin, 17, was walking home after purchasing a snack from a local convenience store. 

Recently, Bitly collaborated with Bloomberg Businessweek on a visualization showing how the media’s coverage of the shooting went from local to national. We explored how various responses to the event (the release of the 911 tapes, President Obama’s public comments) caused spikes in traffic to online articles related to Trayvon.

In mid-April Bill Cosby commented that debate of the shooting should not focus on the role race played, but on the role of guns. Using Bitly data we explored how race was correlated with attention paid to the Martin event. US Census data provided the percentage of African-Americans for each state. We plotted these percentages against the attention each state gave to the event from February 26 through April 21. 

We utilized linear regression to model the data. The resulting line had an R-Square value of 0.86. The greatest outlier was the state of Florida (which is reasonable given the local nature of the story). As you can see from the graph, there is a direct correlation between the racial makeup of a state and the amount of attention that state has paid to the story. While Mr. Cosby may want the story to be focused on guns, the data shows that race has been the focus.

We studied this particular story because of the media impact and because we are investigating how stories and ideas spread through social media. We would love to hear your thoughts and questions!

Sharing interesting stuff with bitly!

Ever wonder how many URLs we shorten per day? The answer is roughly 80 million (and growing). That amounts to a whole bunch of interesting links being shared across the web. Interesting content is exchanged between strangers, acquaintances, and close friends through bitly every day. And in the future, we want to make it easier for you to share links with whoever you want. Until then, we’re going to give you some tips for how to make sharing to Facebook and Twitter through bitly a piece of cake.

1. Create a bitly account! Ok, so we’ve made it easy for you to shorten a long URL without having a bitly account, but sharing through your bitly account is even better! You get your own bitly link for tracking analytics, you can use search to find your links in your history, AND you can share to Facebook and Twitter directly with an account. Sign up to reap all of the benefits.

2. Connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts to your bitly account. Click on your ‘Settings’ tab (upper right hand corner when you’re logged in). You’ll see a section titled ‘Sharing Accounts’. From there, you can add as many Twitter or Facebook profile accounts as you’d like.  

Now, whenever you go to shorten a link, you can select ‘share’. Choose which accounts you’d like to share the link to, and add a message if you want. You can also share via your history by clicking on the gear to the far right.

3. Discover how many people have seen the link. Add a ‘+’ to the end of the bitly link that was shared and enter it into your browser OR go to your account history, find the link you’d like to see analytics for, and click on ‘info page+’. If you’re interested in even more in-depth analytics, you may want to check out Bitly Enterprise.

It’s that simple to share to Facebook and Twitter using bitly.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing more bitly tips and tricks with you. In the meantime, we’d love to hear who some of your favorite bitly users are. Add them to the comments below. 

We’ll start: American film critic and screenwriter, Roger Ebert.

What’s a true click? Humans vs. bots.

Click counts can appear to be substantially higher when bots, crawlers and other automated systems are included in “click” counts. These systems are both ubiquitous and largely invisible on the web, and can account for the majority of click-like events on some links. That’s why our data science team spends lots of time working on classifiers that filter out clicks from non-human agents such as bots and crawlers. What we record on the info page of a link are what we call true clicks which are counted by bitly only when a human clicks on the bitly link. 

This heavy filtering allows for a more accurate understanding of how many times your content was actually viewed. When you look at your click count on a link, you know that bitly clicks represent humans who actively engaged with your content. On the social web, identifying something as basic as a human click can require some heavy lifting. We make a big investment in data science and engineering, so that we create a system that counts clicks accurately and makes the analytics you see more valuable and insightful.

Device Usage on the Social Web

SOPA and PIPA on the social web - right now!

bitly in 2011

From Kim’s short-lived marriage to the earthquake up and down the east coast of the US, more data resonated through the social web this year than ever before.

World events reshaped the geography of the Internet, such that we saw 392 times the number of clicks on Egyptian (.eg) URLs in 2011 than in 2010.

The number of new social sharing platforms continued to increase with the addition of new networks like Google Plus and chime.in.

 

Even diddy and the Dalai Lama got their own bitly short domains this year:

and

And boy does the social web love celebrities! 

all of the clicks in 2011

Yes, 3% of all clicks on links went to pages about top celebrities this year, including some of our favorite gaffes and rumors:

But don’t lose faith in humanity! We saw significant traffic to the top news stories around the year’s meaningful events:

• Jan 2011: Obama’s Speech, The New Yorker
• Feb 2011: Photos from the Protests in Egypt, The New York Times
• Mar 2011: Massive Earthquake Hits Japan, boston.com
• Apr 2011: Is Sugar Toxic?, The New York Times
• May 2011: Adm. William McRaven: The terrorist hunter on whose shoulders Osama bin Laden raid rested, The Washington Post
• Jun 2011: Kissing Vancouver Riot Couple are Identified, The Hollywood Reporter
• Jul 2011: Murdoch exits London home with arm around Brooks, Reuters
• Aug 2011: Best Places to Live, CNN Money
• Sep 2011: Live Stream from Outside the Georgia Prison Where Troy Davis Is to Be Executed, The Nation
• Oct 2011: Apple: Steve Jobs Has Died, Time
• Nov 2011: The Herman Cain crack-up, The Washington Post
• Dec 2011: The Bomb Buried In Obamacare Explodes Today-Hallelujah!, Forbes

Of course, there were lots of cats…

cutest cats by month

And a ridiculous number of rickrolls!

Overall, it was one big year with more than 25 billion clicks on more than 7 billion
URLs!

Happy holidays, social web.

This post lovingly crafted by the bitly science team. We would love to hear from you!

‘Tis the Season for Movies (and Data)!

As we approach the peak of holiday movie season, we’re curious to see which of this year’s films will be break-out hits. With the help of our new reputation monitoring service, we can use bitly data to see which movies people are talking about, as these conversations unfold. By entering relevant search terms (in this case: the titles of the films themselves, and other keywords such as “movie” or the names of the films’ actors) we can discover trending content around holiday films in real-time, and the sentiment associated with that content.

We’re collecting data about every film being released at the end of the year, so the list is more expansive than your normal ‘Top 10 Holiday Movies of the Year.’ We’re hoping as you watch the ebb and flow of these graphs over the next few weeks that our data will help you predict which movies will be box office hits. Share your predictions in the comments below, and stay tuned for a post by our data science team about what movies are in the lead.

How Science Lovers see the Internet

This month we collaborated with our friends at Scientific American to produce a visualization of how people who read about science see the internet (hint: there are a few surprises!)

You can pick up the December issue to see it in glorious print on the last page of the magazine, or click through below to play with the interactive visualization.