Summary:

Bit.ly results are actually public, and I’ll show you how to see how many clicks your competition is getting.  I’ll also explain why you may not want them seeing your clicks.

Details:

Introduction and background on bit.ly

Bit.ly is a URL shortener, which is commonly used in Twitter when people want to post a long URL but can’t fit it in 140 characters.  However, a big advantage to it is that it can actually tell you how many people clicked on the link.  This is great for marketers that are interested in quickly tracking how many people came to their site from Twitter.  If you want more, I also have two advanced videos on bit.ly at

• using bit.ly, then creating the bit.ly bookmarklet (97 second video)
  
• bit.ly “custom name” tip (70 second video)

For current users of bit.ly

The surprising thing is that the results of bit.ly click thru’s are public. They are not just available to the account holder.  If you want to see the number of clicks for any bit.ly link, you just put /info/ in the URL between bit.ly and the unique identifier, and you’ll see the same counts that the account holder would see.

Here’s an example:

On Oct 30^th, @DellOutlet sent out a tweet that said

Last day of Sale – 15% off Dell Outlet Home laptops and desktops with coupons: http://bit.ly/22ZFyi

The tweet can be seen at http://twitter.com/delloutlet/statuses/5288866064 if you want to see it.

Most importantly, anyone can put /info/ into the bit.ly link, and can look at http://bit.ly/info/22ZFyi to see that they got 13,220+ clicks on that link.

The disadvantage of using bit.ly

You would think HP and other competitors would care, and let’s see what HP could learn.  If you believe the common adage that 1% of these people will convert and buy a machine, and assume that they paid $1,000 for it, Dell would have made $132,000 from that tweet.  Tweak the numbers any way you want, but I personally think that they would have made much more than that, and think $200,000-$400,000 is a better estimate.

If I were Dell, I wouldn’t want HP knowing any of this, because HP might smarten up and start using Twitter.  Dell certainly has the technical savvy to use another URL shortener like tinyurl.com and just measure the incoming Twitter traffic through their web logs.  Fortunately for Dell, HP has a pitiful Twitter presence, which is embarrassing to stockholders like myself, but that’s a blog entry for another time.  If someone at HP was smart, and realized that Dell could make hundreds of thousands on a single tweet, they might invest some time and money in a Twitter strategy.

Should you be using bit.ly for your company?  Are you giving competitors useful information?

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