How and why should you make a link shorter on your social media? Here’s why.
URL shorteners are some of the most underutilized tools in internet marketing, and I’ve wished more than once that someone had shared some URL shortening advice with me earlier in my marketing career.
What should you do with extremely long links?
What if you want to monitor the progress?
What if the link, which is long and cumbersome, overshadows the content?
So, if you’re new to the world of URL shorteners, as I was, here’s a list of things you might find useful to know!
Using URL Shortener to Make a Link Shorter
If you’re new to social media marketing, you’ve most likely discovered one of our dirty little secrets.
Links can be cumbersome at times.
They can become quite lengthy.
They can become complicated (especially when you’re tracking them).
They can be a little distracting at times.
And if you’re trying to share useful information with a growing audience, you don’t want all those links to gold content to overshadow your efforts!
Thank goodness for URL shortening services.
When it comes to keeping track of your links, these super-simple tools can save you a lot of time. Furthermore, they improve the appearance of our tweets, status updates, and other updates.
Where and How to Make a Link Shorter?
Fortunately, we have a plethora of great tools to make a link shorter at our disposal, including the native networks and dashboards we use every day.
In terms of tools, there are some cool URL shortening sites that include full analytics and archives of everything you shorten. Your URL is replaced by a new domain (e.g., kevanlee.com changes to bit.ly) and the permalink is replaced by a string of numbers and/or letters (e.g. bit.ly/df8jpI1).
Here are a few of the more well-known link shortening services: “How to Shorten a Link for Instagram Bio.“
Not only do you get a nice, clean, shortened URL from goo.gl, bit.ly, and others, but you also get click statistics for all the URLs you shorten.
In addition to these URL shortening tools, many social networks and social media management dashboards allow you to automatically shorten long URLs.
For example, any link shared with Buffer will be automatically make a link shorter once it’s included in your update.
You can use Buffer‘s own “buff.ly” shortener, as well as shorteners from bit.ly, j.mp, and custom solutions.
Twitter also automatically make a link shorter. There are several possibilities for this: On mobile devices, Twitter frequently uses its own t.co shortening service. Twitter will sometimes include the full URL (minus the http:// part) or will truncate the link after showing the domain and part of the permalink.
Any link you post to Twitter will always take up only 22 characters.
What You Should Do with the Shortened Links
Use a custom, short domain to make links more memorable
If you happen to visit Moz’s Twitter feed, you might notice something unusual about their links.
They have a unique short URL: mz.cm.
Cool!
This is a fantastic opportunity to incorporate some branding into the shortened links you share on social media. At the very least, it could be a fun experiment to see if it increases engagement on your updates (I’ve heard that some people fare better with custom short URLs, others with full URLs, and still others with buff.ly or bit.ly URLs.)
You can watch the video above to know more about how to create a custom short domain.
Monitor all clicks to see how they change over time
Make a link shorter is useful in and of itself, but how do you know who is clicking on them?
Excellent news! Some URL shorteners also allow you to track those links. =) There are several methods for tracking these links:
Some URL shorteners track the actual links.
Bitly is an excellent example of this. Bitly shows you how many times one of your links has been clicked, where the link has been shared, and how other Bitly-shortened links (Bitlinks) are driving traffic to the same content.
Some URL shorteners include Google Analytics tracking data by default.
To be sure, you can manually add UTM tracking codes to any link and then make a link shorter with a simple link shortener. However, some tools allow you to save those tracking codes and have them automatically appended to any links you shorten.
Create a Shortened Bit.ly Link
The ability to make a link shorter is one of my favorite features of Bit.ly’s link shortening service. With bit.ly, you can make your short link looking like “Bit.ly/(Link content)”. So, for example, you’d like to promote your youtube video. You can make the link look like “Bit.ly/MyVideos” to make sure that the link is truly what your audience want to visit.
If you want to know more about bit.ly, read “Bitly Link Creator”
Customizing and make a link shorter is a great way to provide context for where people will go when they click that tiny link.
Include a shortened URL in your video
You’ll want people to remember where they’re supposed to go if you’re running an ad campaign that directs them to a specific website.
When dealing with a long, long URL, this can be difficult. However, when you make a link shorter, online destinations much easier to remember.
For example, I’m writing this as Facebook unveils its exciting new Lead Ads feature. It’s a cool new approach to targeted advertising.
But all the juicy details are on a page with a rather long URL.
A long URL like that might not be a problem unless Facebook is educating people about this new feature via video. And, I don’t know about you, but after watching a video, I’d have a hard time remembering this URL.
Fortunately for us, Facebook shortened that link to a much easier-to-remember URL:
That’s a lot easier to remember, and it looks great at the end of a video!
Incorporate a shortened URL into a plain-text email
The majority of links with which people interact involve more than just a string of URL characters. We’re all probably used to clicking buttons and text links, and we don’t often come face to face with a long URL.
This can make long, “ugly” URLs (especially those adorned with UTM codes) even more perplexing for your audience, especially in plain-text emails. A short URL, on the other hand, can transform a plain-text email with long, stringy URLs into a much more readable message.
Include a shortened URL in a printed piece
Assume you wanted to place a print advertisement in a magazine for one of your products. You’re hoping the ad will drive traffic to your site, but there’s a problem: the ideal page you’d like to send people to is quite long.
However, if you make a link shorter, you may have something that is not only more memorable, but also more printable. You’ll save more of that valuable real estate for ad content and less for trying to make a long string of URL characters look pretty.
However, it does not have to stop with print advertisements: A shorter URL can be useful in a variety of print situations:
- Thank-you notes
- Inserted coupons
- Even donor letters
Conclusion
We’ve covered some of the fundamentals of URL shorteners and how to use them to make a link shorter, but there’s a lot more to these tools than we’ve covered here. I’m curious: what advice would you give to someone who is just starting out with URL shortening for social media marketing?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
