> However, to stay within the character limit constraints of the social media platforms, you use Bitly to shorten the URL.

Why are people still doing this? The only major platform with such limits is Twitter, but using a shortener no longer does anything - Twitter runs every link, bar none, through t.co and counts that URL length against you (which leads to fun situations like the 11 character link http://j.mp being treated as 22 characters).