The content that gets the most attention isn’t always the content that drives the most action. Barbara Clement knows this better than most. As Director of Content & Sponsorships at Hacking HR, she’s seen posts with almost no reactions drive hundreds of registrations, while more polished, well-liked content goes nowhere. How does she know which content is actually driving results? It’s all visible with Bitly.
At a glance
- Hacking HR is a 2 million-member global HR community with over 1 million LinkedIn followers and 900,000 newsletter subscribers, producing constant content with sponsors and partners
- Bitly Links, tags, and UTMs let Barbara separate real engagement from vanity metrics across every channel and campaign
- Drove 4,000 tracked sign-ups from one LinkedIn newsletter push alone, viewable in her Bitly dashboard
Meet Hacking HR
Hacking HR started in 2017 as a space for HR professionals, business leaders, and technologists to share knowledge and solve problems together. Nine years later, it’s grown into a community of more than 2 million professionals and the most engaged HR community on LinkedIn. The organization runs hundreds of events each year, offers certificate programs and mini-masters, and recently launched its first global certification in Strategic AI Leadership.
Barbara leads sponsored content for the community and contributes to its LinkedIn newsletter and email campaigns, work that puts her in the middle of a constant stream of links, QR Codes, and partner deliverables.
The challenge: When “likes” don’t tell the real story
As Hacking HR’s sponsor and partner relationships grew, so did the number of links to manage. Keeping a real-time pulse on performance became essential, but the available tools didn’t make it easy.
The team relied on Google Analytics alongside each platform’s native metrics, stitching together a picture by hand. Enterprise analytics platforms existed, but as a small team, the full suite of modules we’d need was financially out of reach. And social engagement on its own was misleading. A post could rack up shares and still not drive event registrations. Another post could go almost unnoticed with way less engagement and quietly outperform conversions.
“Engagement and conversions often run through different tracks,” Barbara said. “A piece of content can go viral and still drive very little business impact.”
The solution: Tags, UTMs, and a single source of truth
Barbara first used Bitly years ago at a previous company, just to shorten links. When she joined Hacking HR, adoption followed the same instinct that’s guided her ever since: if a tool is intuitive enough, you don’t need a manual to get value from it.
Today, tags and UTMs organize every link by purpose, whether that’s a membership push, an event, a learning program, or a specific sponsor or partner. That structure means Barbara can pull a report or open Bitly Analytics and understand the impact in seconds, without first reconciling five different dashboards.
QR codes carry that same organization into the physical world. Hacking HR uses them at Open House sessions, summits, workshops, and webinars to drive traffic to lead magnets, sponsor landing pages, and program enrollment.
“Bitly makes distribution easy. It also gives you a real-time pulse of real engagement and interactions that does not always match what you see on social media.”
Results and impact
The clearest proof came down to a debate the team almost didn’t have.
After each day of a major summit, Barbara’s team posted a LinkedIn newsletter recap. The posts didn’t get much visible engagement, and at one point, the team questioned whether they were worth the time. Bitly data settled it.
“I could definitely defend that we had to post them [LinkedIn newsletter recaps] because these articles generate between 500 and 1,000 clicks to register for the next day [through Bitly Links].”
That single data point reframed how the team evaluates content. Reactions tell you what people are comfortable putting their name behind publicly. Clicks tell you what they actually do.
The same visibility has shown up at scale elsewhere:
- 4,000 sign-ups to Hacking HR’s latest summit were tracked directly through Bitly Links shared in a LinkedIn newsletter post
- Older social content continues generating clicks long after it’s published, giving the Hacking HR team a data-backed case for repurposing and re-promoting past work
- Programs with the strongest measurable pull, including the AI Experience Summit and AI-focused mini-masters and bootcamps, have benefited most from this visibility
“Bitly gives us confidence to make decisions based on evidence instead of assumptions.”
A specific moment Bitly proved its value
Two years ago, a new partner’s ebook post drove 5,000 clicks in a single day. Since then, another partner’s campaign has generated more than 60,000 clicks across multiple pieces of content.
“We knew exactly which sponsored content was driving traffic and compared our data with the results on their end.”
That kind of cross-checking matters most when a partner’s own reporting and Bitly’s data need to agree. For Barbara’s team, it’s become a routine part of proving sponsor value, not a one-off exercise.
Looking ahead: Teaching every new campaign to report on itself
Barbara sees the next step as automation. Right now, setting up tracking for a new campaign takes manual work, tagging links, updating dashboards, and feeding results into the team’s broader analytics.
Closing the gap between campaign setup and reporting will enable quick insights and visibility into impact across new sponsors and events. She’s also looking at how Bitly Assist could help her team query campaign performance in seconds, pulling insights from links tied to a specific sponsor, topic, or UTM term without manually digging through reports.
From a single short link to a 2-million-member community’s entire content strategy, Hacking HR’s story shows how far a little organization can go. Bitly helped Barbara replace guesswork with evidence, and it can help you do the same. Feeling inspired? Get started today to link your marketing.
