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How I do it : Bulk URL shortening for #socialmedia updates

Koka Sexton 34 Comments , , , , , ,

I post a lot of updates on social media some for marketing and others for social selling activities.

30 a day x 5 profiles = 150 updates [a day] x 7 days = 1050 updates [a week]  x 52 weeks = 54,600 updates [a year].

This doesn’t really take into account the retweets I push from influencers or other interesting updates I find throughout the day, this is just what I have scheduled as updates. But I’ll write that post another time.

What I want to focus on is a way that you can take all of the collected and curated content you have and generate customized shortened URLS for them so you can easily have the updates scheduled for social marketing activities across platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.

It was  a huge pain for me, I had a handful of spreadsheets with hundreds if not thousands of titles and URLs for blog posts that fit a niche and would have to open each on and then shorten the link through Bitly or other shortening app. It was a rough life so I decided to do a bit of research and find a social marketing hack or method that would give me shortened URLs in bulk.

Now I am going to share this tip with you.

Bulk URL Shortening Tool for Social Marketing

 

1. Get a bitly account

Go get a free bitly.com account and log in to your account. Go to your account settings page. In settings, under advanced, you’ll see “Legacy API Key”, click the link and your credentials are shown (have this page open as you’ll need the keys in the the next steps)

bitly_API

2. Get a copy of this URL shortening Google spreadsheet

Be signed in on your Google account and click this link to download the Google Docs spreadsheet

A copy of the spreadsheet will open. Now go to “File” -> “Make a copy” (Important: as this creates a copy which you can edit

bitly_api_copy

3. Customize the Google doc setting

The spreadsheet has two tabs; the “Settings” and the “Bitly URL Shortener” tab, and they are located down at the bottom left corner.

First off, head to the “Settings” tab, paste your Bitly login key into the first cell and your API key into the second cell.

Koka_Sexton_Bit_ly_Bulk_URL_Shortener_Tool

4. start adding URLs

Now go to the second tab “Bitly URL Shortener” and paste in up to 50 URLs into the URL column (column B3). The Bitly free API comes with a 50 URLs at a time limit.

Your bit.ly URLs should now appear in the Short URL column (column C3).

completed spreadsheet

Now I have a custom URL “koka.bz” which is something I bought and then configured bitly to use when I shorten links. without a custom URL you will get shortened links that look like bit.ly/yourlink.

This has been a game changer for me when it comes to creating bulk updates that I can use through one of my social media profiles to share news and information about the industry.

Big shout to Setaris for showing me the way.

Koka Sexton

Koka Sexton is a renowned expert in social selling. Some would say Koka Sexton is the reason social selling exists, he would say that social selling existed once the internet was created. A recognized expert in social selling that has produced revenue for B2B companies, Koka continues to make generating new business the focus of social media. Finding creative ways to plan, develop and execute content marketing campaigns that break through the noise and provide value to buyers in excess of what they expect. He is the founder of Social Selling Labs.

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