Short URLs – Not Just For Twitter Anymore!
Running URLs through a service that shortens their length is a fairly standard practice at Twitter. After all, when you only have 140 characters, you don’t want a lengthy URL address taking up most of your precious, limited space!
At the moment, Twitter uses tinyurl.com to automatically shorten long URLs that you might enter into your Tweet. There are also about a gazillion other free services on the web that let you turn a whale of a URL into minnow. TweetDeck, for example, lets you choose from over a dozen different “URL downsizing” services.
What’s Your Favorite URL Downsizer? My favorite URL downsizer of late is BudUrl. Sure, it creates longer URLs than the popular is.gd. But I love BudUrl for its juicy, mouthwatering metrics. With my BudUrl account, I can track how many people click on my shortened link, from where, and when. When I post a BudUrl, I can check on how many people click on it from Twitter. And because my Twitter posts go directly to FaceBook, I know who clicked on my link from FaceBook. And when.
Better Metrics Lead to Better Writing. Budurl helps me determine which topics are more popular, where, and when. It also gives me insight into which “headline” techniques work better. For example, I may post the same link twice — but with different Tweet lead copy. If I get significantly different clickthrough results, I need to think about which words seem more likely to inspire action. (Hint: many of the old “direct response marketing” copy techniques that work elsewhere in life work well in Twitter. Fancy that.)
Customize your Shortened URL. As I go about my day, I realize that many folks don’t know that you can customize a shortened URL to make it more memorable. Let’s take FaceBook Profile and FaceBook Fan Pages. Those URLs can be doozies!
For example:
Here’s the direct link to my own FaceBook Fan Page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Laura-Bergells/20431199713
Who can remember that? Not me! So here’s how I abbreviated it:
http://budurl.com/lbergells
or
http://tinyurl.com/laurabergells
Shorter. Relevant. More Memorable. Better Metrics. What’s not to like? When someone emails me and wants to know my Fan Page link, I can actually remember http://budurl.com/lbergells witout looking it up! And I can put this link on my Profile Page without it looking like a lengthy, sloppy mess!
Watch the video! If you’re the kind of person that likes a demonstration of how this all looks, I posted a quick 2.5 minute “show and tell” video on my FaceBook Fan Page about shortening your FaceBook URL. You can find it here – http://budurl.com/xlongurls
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Comments
The mac has a great multiple clipboard tool called CopyPaste Pro that has a link shortener built in so you just highlight click a button and you have the short URL in the clipboard to paste anywhere.
http://www.scriptsoftware.com/copypaste
Also it is just as essential as the clipboard itself. Seriously useful.
Since your article was written, Bit.ly has been selected by many Twitter-related companies to shorten URLs. And they way they shorten and then track results is amazing. As an example, here’s an article I wrote about using Bit.ly http://bit.ly/qA32s and if you add a “+” to the end of that url, you’ll see all the metrics http://bit.ly/qA32s+ Bit.ly does a great job – I recommend it highly.
Charlie Seymour Jr
http://twitter.com/UltimateWAHDads
[...] My friend, Laura Bergells from Grand Rapids and a social media maven, posts about BudUrl and tells what she likes about this web application. [...]