UPDATED 19:50 EDT / JANUARY 19 2012

Is Bitly Making a Pivot to the Enterprise?

Bitly, which earned its fame as a URL-shortener for Twitter, is making a big play for the enterprise.

It’s another signal that the enterprise will continue to attract startups that start as consumer oriented companies but find better opportunities with the business community as service providers.  Box started as a consumer oriented company. So did Seesmic, which started out as a video chat service, then turned into a turned Twitter client and is now CRM tool with funding from Salesforce.com.

Bitly still serves the consumer market but its future is in the enterprise. It’s 2012 and it appears that companies both large and small are ready to adopt social technologies.

Today the company launched Bitly Enterprise 2.0.  The new service is a dashboard that according to its Web site says has features for social media teams to do what we expect from the modern messaging platform. That means sharing content, using analytics to find the right insights and developing the right way to reach out to different communities.

Here are some of the new features:


Bitly Composer: Designed to fight “dashboard fatigue,” the service is meant to be used by the increasingly larger teams that have responsibilities for social media marketing.  Composers helps these teams share content across different accounts and measure the performance of the content as it is shared on the Web.  According to Bitly: “You can set up unique permissions for each member of your team, manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts (including Facebook pages), and schedule posts for future dates and times.”

Insight: Insight is reputation management tool.  Enter a term and Bitly will track the volume and sentiment of popular content that is traveling through the entire Bitly ecosystem. Data is backfilled seven days meaning immediate results will start flowing back to the user. Search can also be defined by location, domain, or the social platform that is driving activity.

Advice: Bitly is at its heart an analytics engine. The clicks it tracks are measured across various social networks and platforms.  The new core functionality shows what content users are sharing and how it compares to what the social media team is changing.

These are features that would only be possible for Bitly with an enterprise audience in mind. These kinds of opportunities would never be considered if Bitly had a core consumer focus. It would be all about advertising and earning a few cents for click referrals. In essence, a team that does nothing but find the best way to show a link on a Web page.

Frankly, Bitly Enterprise 2.0 looks a lot more interesting. Who said the enterprise was boring?


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