14 DAY TRIAL // Bit.ly is still the biggest URL shortener out there. It sees a lot of traffic via the short links every day so it's in a particularly good position to know how links shared on social networks and other sites fare.
The company conducted a study on a sample of links and came up with some very interesting results, links shared on social networks die out in only a few hours, that is, most of the traffic they're going to get happens in the first hours.
"We looked at the half life of 1,000 popular bitly links and the results were surprisingly similar," Bit.ly wrote.
"The mean half life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours," it added.
The site with the shortest life span is Twitter. The half-life of a link sent via Twitter is only 2.8 hours, meaning that half of the people that are going to click on a link are going to do it in that time.
Facebook fares a little better, but not by much, the half life of links shared via the social networking site is 3.2 hours.
Surprisingly enough, YouTube actually does a lot better, they have a half life of 7.4 hours.
Not only that, traffic from links shared on the video site, i.e. in comments or the description, follows a very different trend than most social sites, as you can see from the graph.
"In general, the half life of a bitly link is about 3 hours, unless you publish your links on youtube, where you can expect about 7 hours worth of attention. Many links last a lot less than 2 hours; other more sticky links last longer than 11 hours over all the referrers," Bit.ly concluded.