According to a report by AdAge, Bitly has pushed out new reputation monitoring and social search features for its popular link shortening and analytics service.
Since Twitter has decided to take control of short URL’s to do its own analytics service, Bitly has been forced to look elsewhere for growth and customers. The company has decided to focus on real-time reputation monitoring, so companies knows exactly who is talking about them, what they are saying, and where they are saying it. It’s a smart move, since Bitly has gotten wide adoption for its URL shortening service.
Bitly is very late to the real-time monitoring party, and competitors include companies like PeopleBrowsr. With the growth of social media, data and analytics are the only way to prove whether its a worthwhile marketing expense to manage a Twitter account and Facebook page. Companies are putting money into social media, so they are automatically putting money into analytics.
Andrew Cohen, Bitly’s general manager, told AdAge that Bitly has shortens 80 million URLs a day, which is an astounding number, considering Twitter started shortening URLs themselves. This points to the fact that most companies who started using Bitly have stuck with them.
New catch phrases are buzzing around, such as “Conversation Search”, since there is all of this data on the web with no way to collect how effective marketing efforts have been. While this might show that Bitly is reaching for a new source of relevance, it does have a strong user base and massive usage, which may make it a front-runner in the social media data race.
You can learn more about Bitly’s enterprise offerings here.
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