Bitly is announcing today that Peter Stern has resigned to pursue other interests.
“Peter has been a key leader and contributor to the Company,” said Bitly Board member Sam Mandel. “In particular he has been instrumental in transforming Bitly into a successful business while growing its unparalleled data set. We are very happy that he will remain a shareholder and supporter.”
2 months ago
The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.” - Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Since January 2011 we’ve seen nearly 100 billion human clicks on bitly-powered links. Whether it’s the fascination with the russian meteor, Rand Paul’s filibuster, or the cutest of kittens, the social web surprises and gratifies us daily. We’re grateful for the trust and the opportunity to discover and learn about human behavior at the scale of human behavior, and we’re taking a moment to say “wow” before we get back to our regular programming.
2 months agoAs we’ve mentioned in the past, the bitly iPhone app is a great way to access all of your favorite links when away from your desktop, and a great way to share your links via Facebook and Twitter. But did you know you can also connect your iPhone contacts list to the app, making it the ultimate tool for sharing your favorite links with others? You will be able to seamlessly email or text message any of your bitly links to all of your iPhone contacts straight from the app.
When you first install the app you will be prompted to give bitly access to your contacts list. If you said OK, then you are all set and ready to share. If not, you can still give bitly permission to access your contacts. To do this, head to iPhone settings -> Privacy -> Contacts, and turn the bitly switch to ‘on’. (Do not worry- we value your privacy and would never send anything without your permission.)
From there you can head to the bitly app. Simply click on any link in your list, and press the orange share button (with the megaphone icon) on the top right corner of the screen.
When sending an Email the app will immediately retrieve address results from your iPhone contacts list.
Or send your link as a Message; it will include your shortlink and the link title, which you can edit before sending to friends. The message will send as an iMessage or Text Message (depending on the type of phone you recipient has.)
It’s as simple as that! Need to download the iPhone app? You can find it here. Have any questions or ideas? Share the in the comments or reach out to community[at]bitly.com.
The Academy Awards are the final event in the season of awards ceremonies. With the glamour of Hollywood’s hottest in their finest designer gowns, many of us at home can’t help but watch the entire show.
We took this opportunity to use bitly data to see which nominees from specific categories saw the most attention online in the weeks prior to the ceremony. The most interesting thing we discovered was that social media popularity in the week leading up to the big event did not necessarily mean a nominee was destined to walk away with a gold statue. Each one of the nominees that had the most attention in the week leading up to the Oscars came away empty handed last night, reminding us that only members of The Academy actually have influence on who wins.
We used bitly data from Tuesday, 2/7 to Friday the 2/22 to learn how often each nominee was mentioned (or “voted for”) through URLs. For each day, we collected a count representing these mentions. Averaging the last 4 days (Tuesday-Friday of last week) as our “current” level of attention and comparing this to the rest of the month, we can get a factor of increased or decreased attention leading up to the Oscars. This factor is compared over each category for the nominees and converted into a percentage of attention to each nominee (in each category). This percentage can be represented as the number of “votes” that each nominee received in the last week relative to the past.
Our most successful results were in the “Best Picture” category. Silver Linings Playbook received the most attention via bitly URLs, but the actual winner, Argo, came in a respectable 2nd place.
In the best Supporting Actress category we were surprised to see Sally Field, who played a stunning Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln, see more social media attention than Anne Hathaway, who was favored to win (and did win) for her role as Fantine in Les Misérables.
Another surprise was last night’s winner for Best Actor, Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln, who received the smallest amount of social media attention in the days leading up to event.
Best actress winner Jennifer Lawrence saw a fair amount of attention in the week leading up to the Oscar’s, but not quite as much as the adorable Quvenzhané Wallis of Beasts of the Southern Wild, or the talented Emmanuelle Riva from the French film, Amour.
The way the social web comes alive around movies is an astonishing thing to watch. We enjoyed measuring the social attention these nominees received, and love seeing how different events could change the online conversation. For example, during the awards ceremony, Jessica Chastian’s outfit alone probably drove some impressive social traffic. What was your favorite moment from last night? What was your favorite film this year? Share with us below in the comments.
Have you ever wanted to know more about the life of the links you save on bitly? For example, are you the first person to save this link? Was the link popular in the past? Is anyone else clicking this link right now?
You can now learn more about the “life” of any link you save, with key insights about the link that are displayed the second you save it. Key insights include being the first to save a link, or saving a link that was popular today or in the past.
Getting ready to share the blog post you just published? If you’re the first person to save that link on bitly we’ll now let you know. Help others find the link by sharing your shortlink to Facebook or Twitter straight from bitly.
If you pride yourself on finding great current content across the web, you may notice that many of the links you save will be popular right now. This means the link has experienced a very high click rate recently, higher than about 90% of newly saved links that are currently receiving traffic.
You can also see the historical click data for links that were very popular in the past. Maybe a link you just discovered saw hundreds of clicks two months ago. Take this opportunity to bring the link back to life and share it once again.
We hope that these insights help you learn more about the links you save across the web, and we’d love to hear your feedback. Reach out to community [at] bitly.com to let us know what you think, or leave a comment below.
Last week, we hosted our first bitly breakfast at bitly HQ. We brought together community managers and digital strategists for an early morning discussion on how to build community. Dave Brown from MKG, Meghan Peters from Mashable, and Emily Miethner from NY Creative Interns were invited as panelists and provided a great discussion with helpful advice. Here are a few ideas that emerged from the panel:
Share meaningful content
When making the decision to share content Dave asks himself three questions: “Is it meaningful? Is it sharable? Is it awesome?” If you can answer ‘yes’ to all three of these questions, then you know you have meaningful content worthy of being shared.
Photos by Katie Curri & Dave Brown
Remember that you know your community best
Emily shared her experience starting a highly curated job board on the NY Creative Interns website. The idea was born after hearing feedback from young creatives on how difficult it was to find interesting, high-quality job postings on the web. Because Emily and her team know and understand the people involved in their community, they keep this knowledge in mind when selecting which opportunities are best fit for the job board.
Take time to go offline
While it’s easy for Community Managers and Digital Strategists to get sucked into the trap of spending all their time in front of a computer screen, the best way to genuinely engage with your community is to occasionally take it offline. For example, Dave and Meghan have helped organize the Community Manager Meetup in NYC, a chance for Community Managers and Digital Strategists to meet in real life and build connections.
Each panelist also created a bundle filled with useful resources, tools and articles for Community Managers, which you can view below. The bitly community team created one as well.
Dave’s bundle
Emily’s bundle
Meghan’s bundle
Our bundle
Thank you to everyone who attended the event. We’ll keep you updated about bitly breakfasts in the future. Have any suggestions for upcoming breakfast topics? Share them with us in the comments, or email community [at] bitly.com.
Community managers and digital strategists are always looking for ways to do their job better. At bitly, we make it a little easier to organize and track all the stuff you share every day with the people you care about, so that you can better understand what is working and what is not. We make it easy for you to understand how, where and when your links are traveling across the web. Here are some bitly tips for any community manager or digital strategist just starting out with bitly.
With a free bitly account you can…
Save links and find them later, wherever you are
Tired of sorting through old tweets and emails to find a link to that great article or website? Your bitmarks list will display all the links you’ve saved with bitly. Use the search box and sorting tool to find any link within a matter of seconds.
If you’re often on-the-go, download the bitly iPhone app. It will give you instant access to all your bitmarks and bundles wherever you may be.
Count clicks on all your links
After saving a bitmark, bitly will keep track of how many times your shortlink is clicked. You can see detailed stats on all link activity that has taken place in the past 30 days on your stats page.
Set up a custom short domain for better branding across the web
For more consistent branding across the web, purchase a custom short domain and connect it to your bitly account. This domain would take the place of “bit.ly” or “bitly.com” in your shortlinks. For example, NASA uses the custom domain ‘go.nasa.gov’. Learn more about setting up your own custom domain here.
Organize and share links on one page with bundles
Bundles are a simple way to organize your links based on an idea, event or theme. What should you bundle? The possibilities are endless. Learn how to get started here.
Each week Huge creates a bundle of interesting articles to share with all employees at the agency. Learn more here.
Use realtime to search for popular web content
With the bitly labs project realtime it is now possible to navigate through the stories that the world is paying attention to right now. Find new, interesting content around a topic or location of your choice.
“Realtime is really exciting for combining social and SEO efforts. I usually search by a broad keyword (say, ‘SEO’) and research the articles currently being shared on social networks to create a story. The story phrases are great recommendations for social messaging keywords, and showing the domains where the hottest articles are being shared is great for content discovery.” - Jen Marie Robustelli, Marketing and Social Media Coordinator at Conductor.
Contact
Interested in learning more? We’d be happy to help. Tweet @bitly or email community[at]bitly.com with questions or ideas. We also hope to see you this Friday, February 1st for a breakfast discussion on engaging your community. Learn more at http://bitly.eventbrite.com/.
Photo credit: Casey Kelbaugh for the NYTimes
At the end of 2012, we shared some of the most popular bitly links of the year from The New York Times in a bundle. With a little bitly science we discovered that the infamous restaurant review of Guy’s American Kitchen was the third most clicked link from The New York Times. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog and a slideshow of Taylor’s rule in Liberia came in first and second, respectively.
To our great surprise, the love for this Guy Fieri review is large and ongoing. The link continues to see clicks across the web as we complete the first month of 2013. By viewing the stats for the aggregate link (just add a + to the end of any bitly link and click on the global tab) you can see the past 30 days of clicks generated by all bitly links pointing to this page. It’s interesting to notice the peaks and troughs as this link continues to travel across the web. Just as it seems to slow down the link picks up again.
After taking a closer look at where this link traveled we wanted to find out for ourselves whether Guy Fieri’s Test Kitchen lived up to the review. The bitly product team decided to be the guinea pigs and took a field trip to nearby Times Square for our own test. Remember that line in the article, “How did Nachos, one of the hardest dishes in the American canon to mess up, turn out so deeply unlovable?” We are still wondering the same, but the chicken wings were unanimously voted most tasty. We’ll be going to another restaurant based on click popularity soon.
Some of the dishes we tried (Clockwise from upper left): Pulled Pork Slyders, Bacon Chicken Mac & Cheese, Sangria Glazed Shrimp. Photo by: Julia Wilson.
If you’re interested in attempting your own restaurant or recipe test based on popularity- check out bitly realtime. You’ll find all the popular bursting bitly links in realtime based on any search you enter. Share your favorite link finds below, and it just might be our next visit.
3 months agoWe love our bitly links, but some people may find they’d like to add a bit more personality to their shortlinks. This is possible with a custom short domain, which takes the place of ‘bit.ly’ or ‘bitly.com’ in a shortened URL. If you were to use ‘myname.me’ as a custom domain, instead of appearing like this:
bitly.com/bOm096G
your links would appear like this:
myname.me/bOm096G
A custom short domain allows you to add your own personal touch to each bitly link you share. Lots of people are already using custom short domains with bitly to share their content every day.
Birchbox on facebook: (birch.ly)
Ellen DeGeneres on twitter: (ellen.tv)
NASA on twitter: (go.nasa.gov)
Each bitly account can have one custom short domain. It’s free to set up; you just have to own the domain. Interested in getting started? Here are a few tips:
Have any questions? You can always reach out to us on twitter, @bitly or send an email to support [at] bitly.com.
Viewing click counts, grabbing the shortlink, and sorting your links from your bitmarks list just got a lot easier with today’s update. Thank you to the bitly community for sharing your feedback with us. We’ve made these updates with all of you in mind. Here is what you can now do:
• View clicks on your shortlink at a glance. Easily see how many clicks your shortlink received. Want to learn more detailed info about your link? Just click on the ‘i’ icon where it says ‘view stats’.
• Grab your shortlink faster. Click on ‘copy’ and you’re done. Share the link wherever you want.
• Sort your saved links. Now you can sort your links in your bitmarks list & stats page by number of clicks, date created & alphabetical order.
Like before, you can mark any link public or private, add it to a bundle and include a note if you want. We hope these updates make it easier for you to organize, share and view your shortened links. We will continue to make updates based on your feedback, so let us know your thoughts. Send us an email to support(at)bitly(dot)com or tweet at us @bitly. We have more exciting updates on the way!
4 months ago