Use Bitly to Monitor Your Social Media Marketing

By Adam  |  15 Jul 2015 15:00:00

Social media marketing is something that everybody should be doing in order to try and promote their eCommerce business. Whether you use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or whatever else, it doesn't matter; just use whichever platform you're most comfortable with and seems to have the most potential for your business. If you're not on any of them, I'd suggest you sign up for at least one as soon as possible!

So how can you monitor how effective your social media marketing has been? You can share a link to your eCommerce website in a place that you'd expect that people would have an interest in it, but how can you be sure they clicked it? You might have some way to see how many people have visited your website and you may be able to draw reasonable conclusions as to when spikes in visitors were caused by social media marketing. What you won't really be able to determine is which posts have been most effective and what it is that the audience really responds to. Sure, you can go by the number of comments or 'likes' but these do not always correlate with the number of people clicking a link.

This is where Bitly might be able to help you. Bitly is a service which gives you special, customised links and then records every time somebody clicks on one of them and where.it was that they clicked on it. It's incredibly useful as it gives you an idea of what your customers respond to the most. If you occasionally offer discount codes over Twitter for very short periods of time, you can see how many people click through to take advantage of them; if you write guides on how to make best use of your product and share them on Twitter, you can see how many people click through on that too, and if it turns out that the guides are more popular than the discount codes, that means you need to write more guides and share them more often. Bitly is especially helpful to businesses who make use of Content Marketing, since when you see which content is most popular, you know what kind of content to produce in future.

As an additional bonus, Bitly shortens every link that you give it. This makes Twitter marketing a lot easier, since on Twitter you are limited to 140 characters. It is hard to say anything substantial and share a link in only 140 characters, and you need to do both of them to be effective on Twitter, so Bitly stands to help you in that regard. Furthermore, if you include a link at the bottom of emails, a Bitly link is going to look a lot neater than the full URL!

So sign up to Bitly for a great way to monitor your social media marketing! And if you've not yet started up your eCommerce website, sign up for Sellr as well. It is totally free!