One of the greatest things about Twitter is the ability to scan it quickly for resourceful links. When Twitter first burst onto the scene, people needed a way to shorten their links so they wouldn’t take up the whole Tweet. The result of this need spawned a whole slur of URL shortening websites.
Example:
http://www.magicomm.biz/blog/url-shortening-on-twitter becomes http://tinyurl.com/6ae575
Why should I use a URL shortener?
The obvious reason is so you will have more space to tweet. The not so obvious reasons could be:
- Hiding affiliate links
- Masking URLs you don’t want search engines picking up on
- Tracking the URLs usage and clicks
- Preventing URLs from breaking because of bad characters
Although I don’t recommend plastering affiliate links all over the web as TinyURLs (people won’t like you for that)
Tracking
One of the great things services like TweetBurner and Bit.ly have been providing is statistics. TweetBurner allows me to create Shortened URLS in the form of Twurls that I can track after I post it. Tweetburner is one of m favorite shorteners because of all the features and statistics it provides. Bit.ly is another great service I’ve just started using that seems equally as promising.
What if I want to shorten my URLs without loosing any search engine juice?
Something I’ve started to seeing done sporadically around the web is custom URL shoteners. I’m not talking about shorteners that allow you to customize the URL (Example: http://bit.ly/jonbishop). I’m talking about a wordpress plugin that allows you to create your own short URLs on your own domain. I had heard about GoCodes a little while ago and have recently been taking a second look at it. It’s worth a look.
So go explore the world of URL shoteners and begin checking out all the features the different services provide whether it be the classic TinyURL or a more revolutionary approach.
This post is part of the Magicomm series “Printer Tweet Tips“. To keep up to date on other posts in this series, don’t forget to subscribe to the blog feed.
