

If you post a long URL, you won’t be able to track clicks or real-time engagement with it. Using these shorteners provides you with valuable data on how people behave when faced with your shortened URL. You can go back to the goo.gl dashboard to review the stats on your links. Like the other link shorterning services discussed here, goo.gl offers you data on how many times your link has been clicked.

This is also a free service and, unlike many of Google’s products, you don’t need a Google account to use it.

Hootsuite’s shortened URL can also be used in emails or on your site and the stats can be used to track how many clicks those links receive.Īs the name suggests, goo.gl is Google’s official URL shortener. This link shortener allows the user to upload images and track real-time clicks (that don’t include robot clicks), plus you have the ability to post it to various social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+. It can be accessed via your Hootsuite dashboard, or if you don’t use Hootsuite then you can access the ow.ly site directly. Ow.ly is Hootsuite’s built-in URL shortener. Remember though: bit.ly tracks all clicks, even non-human ones. It also offers tracking metrics so you know exactly how many people are clicking on your link. bit.ly is one of the first and most popular URL shortening services. Bit.lyīit.ly is a free service that allows you to share links directly from their site to your Twitter profile, or copy/paste the link for use anywhere. Some URL shorteners also provide tracking abilities so you can track how many clicks you receive on the shortened link. As you may know, a URL shortener converts a regular URL into a more condensed format. This post will cover what URL shorteners are, which ones are used the most today, and why they should be used in the first place. So much effort is put into creating great content that this little string of characters gets knocked to the bottom of the list even though it can be crucial to our social media marketing and SEO.

This crafty technique can provide valuable insight to inform your follow-up communications with the contact.Ī more relaxed Twitter will breathe new life into rich marketing tweets – and it won’t quite be the death of URL shorteners.We often overlook the unsung hero of our social media posts: the URL. If you’re using bit.ly or a similar service you will be able to track which links have been followed and which have not. When you are contacting a group of high priority contacts, you can find out which contacts have engaged with your message by sending a unique, shortened URL to each recipient of your message. This doesn’t mean that URL shorteners are out of the picture forever – in fact, they remain just as useful as ever for ascertaining who exactly is opening your links. If you are of the opinion that 140 characters is a tight enough character limit as it is, you’ll undoubtedly be pleased at the prospect of including a link in your tweet without worrying about cutting down on your character count. Action it!įor social marketers, the implications of Twitter’s reported policy change are simple and agreeable: you’ll have as many as 23 more characters to play with in your rich tweets, if you choose to use them. The rule change would deal a heavy blow to the basic usefulness of their link shortening services – though many marketers will still use shortened links for link tracking. and Ow.ly via Hootsuite must be reeling from this week’s news from Twitter. Bad news for shortenersīosses at URL shortener brands like Bitly, Inc. Bloomberg are saying the rule change for links and images in Tweets could be rolled out within the next fortnight. Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey pledged to look into ways to allow Twitter users to write longer posts back in January this year, and it looks like he’s sticking to his word. Image and web links can take up as many as 23 – that’s just under a sixth – of a Tweet’s 140 characters. The reported relaxation of Twitter’s policy on links in Tweets will come as good news for users who have struggled to get across their message in as few as 117 characters in constricted Tweets. That’s according to US media company Bloomberg, who say they got the scoop from a trusted Twitter insider. Twitter will no longer include image and web links in Tweet character counts.
