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The Beginner’s Guide to URL Shorteners: How to Shorten and Track Links for Social Media

I sometimes feel like URL shorteners are some of the most understated tools in internet marketing, and there have been more than a few times that I wished I’d had someone share some advice on URL shorteners earlier in my  
 
 

For instance:

What do you do with really long links?

What if you want to track the results?

What if the link—long and unwieldy—upstages the content?

So, if you’re new to the world of URL shorteners—much like I’ve been—here’s a list of things you may find helpful to know!

 

 

 

About URL shortening …

If you’re new to the social media marketing space, you’ve probably caught on to one of our dirty little secrets.

Links can be a little unwieldy sometimes.

They can get long.

 They can get a little complex (especially when you’re tracking them).

Sometimes they can be a bit distracting.

And if you’re trying to share helpful information with a growing audience, then you don’t want the links to all that golden content to upstage your efforts!

Thank goodness for URL shorteners.

(Here’s an example, with pomeranians, of a long link that’s been shortened to buff.ly/1irhfHu.)

 

 

These super-simple tools can save you a good deal of headache when it comes to keeping track of your links. Plus, they make our tweets, statuses, and other updates look super clean.


Where & how can you shorten URLs?

Fortunately, we have tons of great tools at our disposal for shortening URLs, including the native networks and dashboards we use every day.

In terms of tools, there are some neat sites that handle URL shortening, including full analytics and archives of everything you shorten. For these services (and for URL shortening in general), 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., kevanlee.com/best-writing-articles changes to bit.ly/df8jpI1).

Here are handful of the more popular link shortening services:

Here’s what it looks like when you use goo.gl, Google’s URL shortener:

At goo.gl, bit.ly, and others, not only do you get a nice, clean, shortened URL, you also get stats on clicks for all the URLs you shorten.

In addition to these shortening tools, many social networks and social media management dashboards also provide a way to shorten long URLs automatically.

For instance, any link shared to Buffer will be shortened automatically once it’s added into your update.


You can choose to use Buffer’s own “buff.ly” shortener, or the shorteners at bit.ly, j.mp, or custom solutions.

Twitter automatically shortens links as well. There are a few different ways this might happen: Twitter uses it’s own t.co shortening service often on link shared on mobile devices, Twitter will sometimes include (minus the http:// part) or will truncate the link after showing the domain and part of the permalink.


6 ideas for how to use URL shorteners in your marketing

If you ever happen to visit the Twitter feed for Moz, you might notice something unique about their links.

They’re using a custom short URL: mz.cm.

Cool!

So links like this:

This can be a really great opportunity to extend some branding into the shortened links you share on social media. And at the very least, it could make for a fun experiment to see if it helps up the engagement on your updates (I’ve heard some folks fare better with custom short URLs, some do better with full URLs, and some do better with buff.ly or bit.ly URLs.)

Kevan put together this quick video on how to set up a custom short domain. You can buy custom short domains from sites like Name.com and set them up to automatically shorten your links with bit.ly and Buffer.


2. Track all the clicks, see how things change over time

Shortening links is valuable in and of itself—but how do you know people are clicking them?

Good news! Some URL shorteners let you track those links, too. =) There are a few ways these links tend to be tracked:

Some URL shorteners track the links themselves.

Bitly is a fantastic 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 automatically attach Google Analytics tracking data.