Which URL Shortener To Use To Improve Your Social Media Marketing

Many social media sites have been integrating URL shorteners into their product because it helps control the formatting of their page. Site owners are accepting more user-generated content than ever and with that acceptance the control over formatting is being turned over to the user.

The benefit of a shortener for site owners is being able to control the length of any URL to a specified range of characters. It may be a matter of forcing characters to fit into a design or it may be for aesthetics.

For Twitter, this is important because there are only 140 characters allowed per tweet.

You can imagine what would happen if you pasted the following URL into your tweet:

• http://material-and-equipment-transport.europages.co.uk/business-directory-europe/did-equip06/hc-05695I/Bottling-and-filling-machinery-and-equipment.html

At 159 characters, you couldn’t send this tweet to your network. Nor would there be any room for your message.

Other site designs are dependent on text fitting within a certain area and URLs are less flexible than text when determining which word(s) will drop to the next line; if there is a next line available in the design.

What are the options and which services are best to use? Although they may appear identical there are many factors of difference between them.

Here are a few things to consider when comparing different URL shorteners:

• What kind of redirect is used (e.g. permanent 301 redirect,  temporary 302 redirect, etc.)?
• Stability of the service (i.e. how often the site goes offline)
• Ease of use (i.e. do they provide Firefox plugins, iPhone apps, etc.)
• Analytics/Link traffic data
• Is there an API available?
• URL customization (e.g. http://bit.ly/myurl)
• Page preview

The permanent 301 redirect is preferred because it allows link juice to flow to your destination url. Stability is also critical because once your link is out there you can’t take it back. If the service goes offline, your link is dead. Ease of use is also important if you’re using shorteners often; having shortcuts is nice with any repeated task.

Here is a very short list of shortening services available:

• TinyURL.com
• Bit.ly
• Id.gd
• Ow.ly
• Tiny.cc
• Tr.im
• Cli.gs
• Su.pr
• Kl.am
• Snipurl.com

For those of us who would prefer not to rely on a third-party service that can change from 301 redirects to 302 redirects or go offline at anytime, I’d recommend a self-installed option. This way your domain, www.domain.com, can provide the shortening service. This customization could be added for a nominal fee from any web developer and give you full control over all of the above benefits/features.

If you’re running WordPress as a website or blog, you can download a plugin called Twitter Friendly Links.

This plugin will convert long post urls like:

http://www.seo.com/blog/the-green-building-center-gets-recession-help-wins-60000-ultimate-web-marketing-makeover-from-seo-com/

To a much shorter url like:

http://www.seo.com/5525

Most people opt for the free version because it’s already developed; and in some cases, built into the service. It’s easy to use today; right now. No matter what you decide, it’s advised to use a consistent service (preferably with analytics) so you can track your URLs and the traffic they’re generating.

– Ash