In what will not come as a surprise to most of those in the industry, popular link-shortening service, Bitly, has announced that they are moving into real-time social monitoring.
What is Bitly?
For those of you who may not know about this platform, Bitly takes a URL that you provide, shortens it into something more social network friendly and then provides simple analytics for each link you have shortened. It’s a great way to publish articles or links to your material on social platforms and then keep tabs on how many times people have actually clicked your link. Anyone creating any kind of content would find this a great tool to measure how many click-throughs each piece of content receives.
Going Into Real-Time Reputation Management, What’s In It For Me?
Firstly, it’s important to explain what Bit.ly is actually proposing as part of its new feature set. Being one of the largest link shortening and tracking services online, Bitly collects data on a very large number of links. This gives them a lot of authority and insight into how links are shared and distributed online. Bitly is now taking their insight and expertise on this matter and extending their platform to provide anyone with an Enterprise account the ability to monitor keywords online and be alerted to significant changes in attention and traffic for those keywords.
Hang on, doesn’t this sound a lot like Google? In a way, yes. Google scours the web for web pages, identifies their authority and relevance to search terms, and then presents those pages based on user queries. But take the example that you post a blog article this morning. It still takes some time for Google’s crawlers to find and index your blog page. In the time that it does so, you have probably shared it through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus. In the minutes that follow, you have probably had a large number (aren’t you popular!) of other people share the same link on their social networks. In the space of half an hour, the piece of content you have created has traversed the Internet three times, generating hundreds of clicks and infiltrating every social network worth its name. Because Bitly is tracking your links and clicks in real-time, it can immediately detect how widespread and popular your content has become and report back straight away.
So now let’s imagine that your blog post was a piece of content about Brand X. The brand manager for Brand X, if using Bitly’s new service, can immediately be alerted to the fact that your blog post about the brand they manage is getting a lot of attention moments after you have published it. This will draw their attention to your post as soon as it becomes viral, read the content and respond appropriately (if a response is required). With Google, they would have had to wait a few days for your post page to be found, indexed and built enough authority to land on the front page to get their attention. With this real-time monitoring tool, they have the ability to detect and read news about the brands or keywords they monitor as soon as it happens. With the increasingly dynamic nature of the modern Web, being up to date is extremely important.
Questions? I’ll be happy to answer to the best of my knowledge. Hit the comments below!
