Bitly (formerly known as Bit.Ly) is the world’s best link shortener. What it does, in a nutshell, is shorten long web URLs into smaller links, leaving you with more character space to compose the all-important body of your Tweet. Your links should end up looking something like this:

bit.ly/xwUcz1c

One would have to say that this in itself is reason enough to start using Bitly, but that is really only half of the picture. What is really awesome about Bitly is its ability to track the number and source of all clicks you get – an infinitely useful way to measure the popularity and success of your various pieces of content!

Bitly allows you to view the stats for each of your links in hourly or daily tracking graphs, as well as in a combined view, which shows a summary of all the links on your account. For all of our fellow data lovers reading, you can even go a step further and break down your clicks according to the referring site, and the country they came from.

Bitly offers a fantastically easy to use interface, and is compatible with Twitter and most other 3rd Party Twitter apps. It even keeps track of the Twitter conversations that occur around each of your shared links.

If you are not currently using Bitly to shorten your links, you really should be!!