In the ever-growing age of social media, Facebook and Twitter have provided a great platform for the business firms to expand and promote their products online. Especially with Twitter which allows 144 characters only, it becomes immensely important not to exceed the its limit and see that our information is succinct. This is exactly where URL Shortening services come to use. URL shortening service Bitly was accessed more than 2 Billion times in November 2009. The reason people use these services is because they provide much more than just shortening links.
What is a URL Shortener | Uses and Advantages
Now, what does a URL shortener do?
YES! As the name itself suggests, a URL shortener decreases the length of a long URL making it a lot shorter but still leading the user to the same required destination. There are a lot of free link shortener services present online, but before all that we need to know the advantages or benefits of URL shortener.
- Short is the new SEXY!!
There is no denying in the fact that a short URL saves you the space, but it adds style quotient too. Shorter URLs are appealing to look at, looks stylish and at the same time does all the functions that a normal URL is supposed to do.
- Analytics and Statistics
URL shortening services such as bitly and google provides much more than shortening the URLs. You can also monitor how many clicks your link has received, how much is it being shared online and in which countries, that too along with the real timeline of when these events took place. - Because Everyone else is Using it
“600 Million links shortened in a month, 6 Billion Clicks in a Month. 400 servers. Company of 50 people including 20 engineers” — Above is the recent data stats that were recorded recently by BITLY. Just imagine the number of users who are employing URL shorteners and taking its advantages for free. Make sure that your progress is not being hampered by this.
Now that we know what are the uses and advantages of the URL shortening services. There are a lot of organisations which provides the URL shortening services present online. It is very important to know which URL shortening service to go for. Let’s Find that out!
Google VS Bitly- URL Link Shorteners | 7 Key Differences
- Powerful Tools and Analytics
Both Bitly and Google provide the analytical tools to see how well your shared link is doing online. How many retweets and shares, demographics and popularity of your links. Bitly has a lot of advanced features and tools over google. Bitly provides smarter analytics tool that enable one to experience real time experience of how their shared link is performing online. - Custom URLs
Let us say that you want to generate a custom URL. Custom URLs are easy to remember and are generated by the user itself. Only bitly provides the feature to generate custom URLs. At the present, google shortener link does not provide this feature. - Google Analytics is in PUBLIC MODE
Right now, google provides analytics in the public mode only. Therefore, anyone who has the shortened link can access to all the information regarding that link by adding + at the end of the google link. One of the biggest advantages of bitly is that it features a private mode alongside the public mode.
- Bitly knows what’s Trending
Bitly Shortener has an interactive application named Real Time which provides a detailed analysis of what is hot and trending in the market. You can get all the details such as which topic is getting how many shares online and is right now being preferred over others. A feature that a lot of bloggers would die to get their hands on. - Redirecting Time (Speed)
Google shortener is much faster than the bitly. Therefore, Google shortened links would take less time to redirect the links to their original destination in comparison with the bitly shortened links. Google links takes 1.8ms to redirect to the original destination vis-a-vis 3.4ms of bitly links. - Security Issues
Google has a very big advantage over bitly in terms of security. Bitly users suffer from a lot of abuse from the spammers, which degrades the efficiency and quality of bitly links. Abuse decreases significantly when google shortener links are used.
- Trust Factor
People are aligned to trust a google shortened link than bitly links because of the brand name and the trust that people have in the organisation.
Finally, after concluding all the key differences between bitly and google shortener link, I would like to make an HONEST CONFESSION. I would prefer bitly over google any given day, because of its smarter and powerful analytical tools. Along with being user-friendly, it is also easy to integrate bitly with other services like android, iOS and web browsers.
Needs drive necessity. Both of these services have their own strategy towards analytics and statistics. Your decision should depend on whether you need simple shortened URL or you require an in-depth approach. What’s your say?
