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.

After a year and a half in testing, domain shortening service Bitly has moved its Bitly Pro service out of beta and straight into its core offering, now providing domain shortening and link analytics completely free of charge.

The service notes in an official blog post that it now powers over 10,000 custom short domains but will allow any new user to register their own URL for free and without a waiting period. All that a user needs to do is change the DNS settings to point to Bit.ly’s servers and then sign up for the service in account settings.

Not only will users get a short domain, they will be able to register for tracking statistics, allowing users to check how their content is performing on social networks including Twitter and Facebook. Any Bitly link that points to the same domain will also be tracked in the dashboard.

All of these features require an account, so if you haven’t signed up head over to Bitly.com and sign up for a new account (you can even use your Twitter account should you wish) and setup the features.