Use your own Bitly links in the newsroom

Whether it's for a social media release or a tweet, the use of short (perma)links is useful for several reasons. It goes without saying that the use of a shortened permalink is essential for social media channels like Twitter, where it is important to use your space sparingly. Although Twitter reduces links automatically (up to 20 characters), it is better to register your own short link account and use it for all channels. An important aspect of the use of short links is namely the ability to monitor web traffic by keeping track of how many clicks a certain link generates; short link services are particularly well suited for this. It is also possible to manually adapt your shortlinks for a variety of publications, in order to keep track of the traffic generated per channel, allowing more accurate monitoring.
 

There are several short link services available, of which Goog.le, Bitly and Ow.ly, linked to social media dashboard application Hootsuite, are the most used. Bitly is currently the most popular short link service, with a wide range of tools: in addition to making and monitoring shortlinks it also offer the possibility of making bitmarks, the 'better bookmarks', that enable the storing and sharing of links. 
Many companies go one step further in their use of shortened links and register their own domain of shortlinks. Examples include PressPage users Eneco and KLM, with respective shortlinks ene.co/11VSrNR and klmf.ly/ZdHsNd. A custom short link looks better, but it also generates trust and ensures the user that it refers to an authentic source.