You’re familiar with bitly aren’t you? It’s the service that you use to shorten a link.
bitly puffer fish
For example, my last post on switching to a WordPress website had this lengthy link, http://writespeaksell.com/are-you-thinking-of-switching-to-a-wordpress-website. I went to my bitly account and shortened the link to http://bit.ly/NgENK2.
The advantage is you can get more information into a tweet without using too many of the 140 characters you’re allotted for Twitter updates. It also saves space and looks cleaner when you use the bitly link on social media sites.
Tracking Your Traffic
More important, though, is that bitly tracks how many click throughs your links get on your social media networks. This gives bitly valuable information about the optimum times to post content to Twitter, facebook and tumblr. You also learn which are your most popular posts by the number of click throughs and the less popular posts that landed with a thud.
The bitly blog is on the tumblr. platform. I guess that’s why they chose that network and didn’t analyze click-throughs on Google+ or LinkedIn. Click on Time is On Your Side for the full report. Here are highlights. All times are based on U.S. Eastern time.
Posting on Twitter in the afternoon earlier in the week offers the best chance at achieving a high click count (1-3 pm Monday through Thursday). Don’t post after 8 pm and stop tweeting after 3 pm on Friday, because Twitter chatter dies over the weekend. However, higher traffic means more competition for eyeballs and clicks so you’d better be posting great content.
Links posted from 1 pm to 4 pm result in the highest average click throughs. Facebook traffic peeks mid-week. As with Twitter, avoid posting on the weekends.
Traffic from facebook fades after 4 pm. If you must post in the evening, posting earlier, at 7 pm, results in more clicks on average than posting at 8 pm.
tumblr.
This network shows a dramatically different pattern of usage from facebook and Twitter. Tumblr. users are night owls. Postings after 7 pm on average receive more clicks over 24 hours than content posted mid-day during the week. Bitly traffic from tumblr. peaks between 7 pm and 10 pm on Monday, Tuesday, and Sunday.
Bitly’s Other Features
While we’re at it, bitly had a major redesign recently and added several features you should know about (although I do wish they would revert back to the original design and stop making so many changes). With the redesign they shortened their own name from bit.ly to bitly.
- Bitmarks. You can bookmark links and share them with friends. Bitly calls them bitmarks.
- A Bundle. This is simply a collection of your bitmarks that you can share with your networks.
- Stats. This chart shows the number of click throughs for the past seven days, total clicks and total saves.
- Sources. Click on a link and you will learn the source of the clicks and countries.
- Apps. An iPhone app and a Chrome extension enable you to save and share bitmarks.
- Share. You can add your Twitter and facebook accounts in your settings to see what friends are sharing.
Hope you found this information useful. Have you noticed any uptick in your traffic when you post updates on specific days and times? What do you think of the bitly redesign?
