5 reasons why it pays to shorten your URLs

With the rise of social networking, marketing is morphing from a one-way to a two-way communication vehicle. Today, marketers are looking for opportunities to become part of the conversation.

Even before the recent Ashton Kutcher / Susan Boyle / Oprah activity on Twitter, it was clear that the microblogging service had arrived and displaced Facebook as the "it" social networking marketing vehicle. But Twitter's 140 character limit provided a real challenge for verbose marketers to converse (mea culpa: I have been guilty of writing texts too long). What's a marketer to do?

Beyond abbreviations taken from instant messaging, there isn't much to do. Marketers have to learn to be brief (and be thankful that Twitter has 140 characters, and not 26 characters like Flutter).

Relief can be found in URL shorteners like TinyURL and Bit.ly. Here's what marketers can gain from shortened URLs:

Better for microblogging services like Twitter
As interactivity is crucial to interactive marketing, marketers want to include links in their tweets. But with corporate link structure, it's hard to provide a short link. URL shorteners can take a 70-character link and reduce it to 20 characters. That means that you'll have another 50 characters for your tweet. With tweets limited to 140 characters, those extra 50 characters are a lot.

Marketing opportunity in URL shortening
One of my favorite features of URL shortening from a marketing perspective is the "Custom" option (as it's known in TinyURL), which allows you to add descriptive words to your shortened URL. Yet most of the A-list Twitterers I follow aren't using this functionality.

Let's say you just read a great article about the upcoming summer movie season and decide to tweet it. Don't you think more people would click on the shortened URL if it included "BestSummerMovies"?

I recently tweeted an article I wrote for a media publication with advice intended for The New York Times. Before tweeting my article, I added the words "How2SaveTheNYTimes" to the URL shortener so these words would also appear in my tweet, with the actual link appearing like this: http://tiny.cc/How2SaveTheNYTimes.

With the status of The New York Times a hot topic in media circles, I believed that adding "How2SaveTheNYTimes" to my shortened URL would entice people to click through and read my article. And in my unscientific study, that link was clicked on more than any other link I have ever tweeted.

People include URLs in their tweets because they want readers to click through. Why not add a few enticing descriptive words to encourage those reading your tweet to click?

Tracking, tracking, tracking
In real estate, it's all about "location, location, location." In online marketing, it's all about "tracking, tracking, tracking." Whether clicks or conversions, online marketers are concerned with tracking performance

Bit.ly, another URL shortening service, makes its data available for third-party developers who want to use the data. Bit.ly also enables keeping track of click-throughs, which can tell us what the hottest links on the web are in real-time (among Bit.ly users, that is).

Assists with SEO
With everyone talking about search engine optimization, I wondered if URL shorteners had any impact on SEO. I consulted with Sam Michelson from RepRelations. "Using a URL shortening service is not bad for SEO, provided you use a service like TinyURL, which uses 301 permanent redirects," Michelson said. "This tells Google and other search engines that the content was once on one site and is not permanently on the other site. While it is always better to use your own domain if possible, TinyURL and similar services are a good solution for times when the original URL is too long or may not display properly for the reader."

Beyond Twitter
The value for shortened URLs in Twitter is clear, but what about beyond Twitter? Truth be told, TinyURL was created by web developer Kevin Gilbertson in 2002 -- four years before Twitter was founded -- to link directly to newsgroup postings, which frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.

There are many situations where shortened URLs are valuable. With all mobile communications, fewer characters are better. And when sending or posting a link to an article or blog post, it's convenient to be able to name the link in a way that will resonate with the recipients.

The main criticism of shortened URLS is that marketers lose some control because their corporate domain name isn't included. That said, social marketing is all about losing control in order to gain some trust and respect, which at the end of the day, is good for marketing, be it social or not.

Uriah Av-Ron is partner and founder of Oasis Public Relations.

On Twitter? Follow Av-Ron at @uriah_oasis_pr. Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.