Why URL Shorteners are a Good Idea

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If you’ve ever got lost trying to write down or type a long URL like: http://www.verylongdomainname.com/index/wherenext123/perhaps here/perhapsthere/?01dontknow/youhavetobejoking/phewatlast.html, the chances are the person giving it hasn’t heard of URL shorteners or that it could have been made it into http://bit.ly/atlast (I don’t know if that’s a real web page by the way!).  This also makes the web address much easier to remember, and pass on.

Shortening an unwieldy and long URL is very convenient. If you use Twitter, you’ll know the number of characters is at a premium (only 140 per tweet), so the shorter the url, the longer the rest of your tweet message can be.

When you use a long URL in an email, there can be problems as a long link is more likely to ‘break’, in other words clicking on it doesn’t take readers where you intended them to go.  Instead they end up with an error message.  While you’d think people would get in touch and let you know the link was broken, often they forget because they’re busy, and you’ll always wonder why there were so few click throughs to your latest promotion.

Some URL shorteners enable you to ‘personalise’ the result. For example, you might want to include ‘mynewproduct’ – so the shortened URL would be http://tinyurl/mynewproduct (hopefully not a real web page!)

If you use Hootsuite as your Twitter client, they offer two URL shorteners: Ht.ly includes a ‘social bar’ (see below – the bar is at the top of the screenshot).

This means you can easily Retweet the blog post and have access to submit the link to Digg, Reddit, Delicious, FaceBook, etc.

The second of Hootsuite’s URL shorteners is Ow.ly – which creates a simple short link.  Both Ht.ly and Ow.ly provide click through statistics.

Click through stats are possibly one of the most compelling reasons to use a URL shortener (not all of them provide this service, so check the one you use does).  Being able to see how many people are clicking through to your webpage or blog using your link is very valuable marketing data to have.

It’s a good idea to check the shortened link before you give it out – just click to make sure it takes you to the page you want to go to!

There are many (over 100) different URL shortening tools, some more reliable than others.  For an in depth analysis of performance and uptime, see Mashable’s helpful blog post from earlier this year.

Have you tried URL shorteners?  If so which do you like?  Please share in the comments below – and if you found this post helpful, we’d love a retweet