Clean, clickable links can make a huge difference, especially on mobile-forward platforms like X, where long, cluttered destination URLs can feel overwhelming and discourage clicks. Short links not only look better, but they’re easier to share via social media, SMS, and email. They also help you build trust and deliver a seamless experience across channels. Plus, when you can track link performance in real time, you gain valuable insights that help you improve your marketing campaigns.
That’s where Bitly comes in. We help you create short, branded, trackable links without altering your original URLs. With our URL shortening service, branded short links, link management, and detailed analytics, you can maintain brand consistency and drive more meaningful engagement. In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know about using Bitly as a URL shortener for X.
Note: The brands and examples discussed below were found during our online research for this article.
Why do you need a link shortener for X?
URL shorteners take any long URL and shorten it down to between 20 and 30 characters. But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that shortened URLs deliver other benefits beyond brevity. These four advantages of shortened links top the list for most Bitly users:
Look less suspicious and use fewer characters
Long links that are difficult to recognize or decipher look suspicious. In today’s connected world, most X users know to be wary of unfamiliar or sketchy-looking links. Even if your link is legitimate, people probably won’t click as often if it doesn’t look legitimate.
The other consideration is character count—something that matters more on X than any other social network. The current character limit for unpaid posts is 280 characters. That’s not a lot, especially considering the length of even relatively compact full-length URLs.
For example, here’s the URL for another Bitly blog post on enterprise social media strategy.
https://jp-paus.com/blog/enterprise-social-media-strategy/
That URL is 56 characters—one-fifth of the length of a regular X post!
Our blog post on social media channels has this 45-character URL:
https://jp-paus.com/blog/social-media-channels/
These are on the longer side for us because we have a very short domain name and try to keep our URLs nice and compact, but they are low for many brands’ typical blog posts.
Compare that to the 22-character short link we’ve created for our URL Shortening 101 guide, which looks like this:
bitly.is/urlshortening
Short URLs like this give you more space for social media or direct message text, and they can build more trust with your audience. In this instance, we created a branded link and a custom URL, which is something Bitly users like you can do too!
Build brand awareness with branded shortened links
Branded links go beyond just removing suspicion. They extend and promote your brand at the same time. Consider our example link, bitly.is/urlshortening. It saves our character count and tells readers exactly who’s behind the link, while also providing a pretty good summary of what they’ll learn if they click through to the target page.
Granted, our own Bitly-branded links don’t stand out quite as much because the Bitly name is already associated with our free URL shortener. Yours will stand out considerably more: Imagine [YourBrand].is/ or [YourBrand].co/ short links—easily identifiable, building trust, and increasing brand visibility, all at once.
Enable easy engagement tracking
Using Bitly to shorten your links unlocks a powerful advantage: Real-time engagement tracking that goes far beyond basic social platform metrics like impressions, likes, or retweets. Your social media team can see exactly which posts, channels, or campaigns are driving real clicks right now, not just vanity metrics. This actionable data empowers you to adjust your strategy in the moment, optimize posting times, A/B test different calls to actions (CTAs), and fine-tune messaging that maximizes social media ROI.
With Bitly’s real-time analytics, you can also compare the performance of organic vs. paid social posts and easily layer in additional insights from tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for a fuller picture. These link-level insights help provide essential context for future posting strategies, making it easier to double down on what works and quickly pivot when needed. Whether you’re managing day-to-day posts or running a multi-channel campaign, Bitly helps you track what’s truly driving engagement, not just surface-level interactions.
Protect users from malicious sites
When you choose a quality link shortener, you gain access to powerful trust and safety tools that help protect both your brand and your users. Spammers and scanners can target any link-shortening service, so Bitly actively combats this risk. We continuously monitor and flag suspicious activity, scanning every link for malicious content and blocking harmful URLs before they can reach your audience.
This proactive approach helps prevent phishing attacks, malware distribution, and other security threats, keeping your users safe and your brand reputation intact. With Bitly, you’re not just sharing short links; you’re sharing safer, more reliable connections.
How to create short links for X using Bitly
Bitly makes it incredibly easy to create and manage short links for X or any other social media platform in one convenient place. This focus helps social teams streamline their workflows and track performance across channels from a single location. Whether you’re managing organic posts, paid campaigns, or multi-platform strategies, Bitly gives you the tools to quickly create, customize, and monitor all your social links with ease. Here’s how to make it all work:
Step 1: Paste your long URL into Bitly
Start by copying the long URL you want to shorten. This URL could point to a blog post, landing page, product page, or any piece of content. It can even include Bitly UTM parameters for deep analytics integrated with your CRM stack or other software suites.
Log in to Bitly on desktop or mobile, and click or tap on the Create new button. Select Shorten a link and paste your link into the field labeled Destination. You can also add a custom title to the Title field to make your link easier to identify and manage in the future.
Step 2: Customize your link (optional)
Once you‘ve added your destination, you can customize the back half of the URL to make it more relevant and memorable (like bit.ly/springdrop) by adding text to the Custom back-half (optional) field. If your team has a custom domain (like yourbrand.co) and an appropriate Bitly plan, you can select it in the Domain field to create fully branded, trustworthy redirect links that reinforce your brand identity (like yourbrand.co/report2025). Custom links not only look better but can also build credibility with your audience.
Step 3: Add UTM parameters for tracking (optional but recommended)
For deeper campaign insights, you can add UTM parameters to your links. UTMs help tools like Google Analytics track exactly where your traffic is coming from and how specific posts are performing. They offer a smart way to compare content, channels, and campaigns. Just remember to add UTMs to your long URLs before you shorten them in Bitly to keep the tracking clean and intact.
Step 4: Copy and share on X
Once your short link is ready, simply copy it and paste it directly into your post on X. You can place the link early in the post for quick visibility or use it at the end to drive clicks after your hook or CTA. Either way, Bitly’s short, clean links help keep your posts visually appealing and easy to engage with.
Step 5: Track performance in Bitly
After sharing, you can track link performance anytime in your Bitly Analytics dashboard. With a paid plan, you’ll get access to powerful engagement analysis that shows how many clicks your links are getting and how different posts or campaigns compare. This real-time data covers not just the number of clicks per day and over time, but also device/OS type and city/country location, helping you get a complete picture of your campaign’s overall impact.
Get more value from every X post with Bitly
Long links can lead to the best actions, but brevity is the soul of wit, especially on social media sites like X with specific character counts. URL shortening lets you marry the best of both these worlds, offering concise, punchy, on-brand links that can carry users deep into highly-structured content with minimal overhead.
Bitly helps social teams get more out of every post on X and beyond. By combining clean, clickable links, brand control, and real-time engagement insights, we empower you to build trust, drive more meaningful interactions, and continuously improve your social media strategy. You’re not just shortening links—you’re creating smarter, trackable connections that help you understand what’s actually working.
Ready to streamline your social links and unlock powerful tracking? Sign up today to start cutting the fluff from your X posts and driving users to the content you want featured everywhere.
