Most PR campaigns are integrated, so how do you evaluate the effectiveness of social media, such as a corporate blog, when typical AVE evaluation is no longer viable?

[caption id="attachment_1864" align="alignnone" width="300"] View stats from my bit.ly account[/caption]

Many of you will know bit.ly as a tool to shorten URLs for use on Twitter and other similar sites, but it is also an incredibly useful tool that can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, providing you with instant feedback in the form of graphs and statistics – and even better it’s free.

Bit.ly is incredibly simple to use.  It allows you to track the unique user-level aggregate links, view complete, real-time traffic and referrer data, as well as location and metadata. You can also link up your Bit.ly account with applications like Tweetdeck, and because it filters links to check for spam, suspected phishing scams, malware, and other objectionable content, it is safe to use.

Put simply, you can

• Track the amount of people that have clicked on your link
• View the geographical location of your audience
• See the amount of times your link has been replicated and where e.g. on Facebook, Twitter etc
• View your click-through rates
• Easily share your bit.ly links via Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, and your default email client. You can also use the bit.ly info bookmarklet to share a link while you are on a page

Also, another bonus of Bit.ly links is they won’t break in emails and they never expire – so get blogging and tracking!