Shrinking Long URLs on Twitter
In our previous post, Searching on Twitter, we talked about some helpful tools for searching on Twitter and using hashtags. By the way, we go into much more detail about our Infinite Pipeline Relationship Development process in our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for B2B Sales Success – Sales Person Edition. See the bottom of this post for more info.
In this post, we continue the Twitter series with a quick look at how to make the URLs you share shorter and easier for your readers to use.
Some rights reserved by SterlicShrinking Long URLs
You may have noticed the odd URLs in the footnotes of this book. We are using an URL shortener called Bit.ly. Although URL shorteners have been around at least since the first popular one, TinyURL, launched in 2002, the length limitations of Twitter and other social media statuses have caused their use to explode. These free services take a long URL, such as, for example, the URL to one of our blogs — http://www.socialmediaperformancegroup.com/index.php/blog/94-branding-in-the-social-computing-age — and turn it into an URL that is much shorter, and easier to remember or type — http://bit.ly/aaOk1J.
When someone clicks on the shortened URL, their browser is directed to the shortener’s site, in this case Bit.ly, which looks up the original long URL, and redirects the browser there.
With the dramatic growth of demand, shorteners like Bit.ly now provide other services, such as vanity short URLs — like http://bit.ly/smperformance — and usage tracking, allowing the creator of the URL to see how many people have clicked on it.
Since you need to include the lengthy http:// portion of the URL when you tweet, the shorter the name of the shortener site, and the fewer characters it needs to do the job, the better.
As an example, here are three ways www.careeronestop.org is shortened using different URL shorteners:
- http://tinyurl.com/d6m6hu — 25 chars
- http://bit.ly/2lJGiH — 20 characters
- http://is.gd/pGDa — 17 characters
Shrinking Long URLs on Twitter is the 110th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 305. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2
Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV
What Others Are Saying
“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies
“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)
“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances
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