If you’ve spent any time tooling around Twitter, Facebook or the like, you’ve probably seen—and clicked—on shortened links to webpages. The most common short URLs start with ‘bit.ly,’ ‘ow.ly’ or ‘tinyurl.com.’
With a URL shortener, you can reduce this:
http://smallbizbigtime.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/do-you-need-a-facebook-group-or-fanbrand-page/ (gulp!)
to this:
http://bit.ly/4IXYAc (ah!)
Such shortening is essential when posting links on Twitter, with its limited, 140-character messaging, as well as when updating your status on other social sites. Those long URLs are clunky and junky. The shortened URLs are lean and clean.
If you want to keep your links short and tweet, here are a few pointers about the most commonly used URL shorterners.
bit.ly
This service is the URL shortener associated with Twitter since midyear 2009. Simply paste a long link, and the site will shorten it for you. If you create an account on the site, you can link to your Twitter account(s) for quick, easy posting and view click-through tracking and post history. I personally find it very helpful to see what links evoke the most number of clicks—very handy. Also, you can create a custom name for your link so that it’s simple to remember. The site also accommodates the uploading of files, though I’ve personally hit glitches when attempting this.
bit.ly – sign up to track your clicks, customize your links, post directly to Twitter accounts
tinyurl.com
This site, formerly Twitter’s default URL shortener, is another good go-to when you want to personal the shortened URL. You don’t have to create an account to use the service, and you can customize your URL for memorability. For example, I created this link for my singer-songwriter husband’s Facebook fan page: http://tinyurl.com/jpfanpage. You won’t be able to keep up with click-throughs or access a history of your shortened URLs with this service, however.
tinyurl.com – no sign-up required, custom URLs, no link history information
ow.ly
This service is associated with the popular Twitter client HootSuite, though you can access the site directly for quick URL reduction. Like bit.ly, there are added benefits if you create an account (file uploads, direct posts to Twitter and other social networks), though you must use through HootSuite to have access click-through stats and link history. There’s talk of making more features available to those who don’t utilize HootSuite, but we’ll see. The ow.ly team touts more privacy on link creation data versus bit.ly, if that means anything to you (it doesn’t to me, really; I create shortened links specifically for public use, after all).
ow.ly – best if used with HootSuite, easy sharing functionality to multiple social sites
For what it’s worth, I’m good with bit.ly these days. I dabble with all three, but I stick with bit.ly because of the easy access to click-through history. I suppose if I was a HootSuite user, ow.ly would be the way to go.
No matter what service you choose, bear in mind that nothing’s permanent in the ever-evolving world of social media tools. Just as tinyurl.com has waned since Twitter aligned with bit.ly, there will certainly come a time when another new service becomes the preferred alternative. Google’s introduced goo.gl, its own variant of this concept, usable only within itsproducts and the Firefox toolbar; Facebook’s toyed with its own link shortener as well. More will surely come.
As a service may fall by the wayside, so may the links you once created. The word for that is “linkrot.” And in the biz of URL shortener, it just might be hard for any of these guys to create a sustainable business model long term, thus the links these services create may eventually become broken.
Yet as long as we have some way to shorten and share, our links will continue to be the ties that bind!
Thanks for dropping by!
No comments:
Post a Comment