The Short List: How & Why to Shorten Your Links

Jamie Schneider

Digital Strategist for the North American Division.

We’ve all seen shortened URLs, but do you know why social media managers often shorten long links? Here is a quick “short list” of why and how to utilize link shorteners.

What:
URL shortening allows you to tighten up a long trackable URL to something short and easy to copy for social media posts.

In other words…

THIS:
https://www.adventistlearningcommunity.com/faith-reason-earth-history?&utm_campaign=FaithReasonEarth-2017&utm_source=Social-Media

BECOMES: https://goo.gl/ZaBXgL

Why:

• Saves valuable space in your social media posts
• Hides/masks UTM codes (trackable links)
  
• Looks cleaner for marketing messages
  
• Easy to share
  
• Built-in tracking
  
  

More on tracking…
Many link shortening tools also track click-throughs (how many times the link has been clicked). Below you can see that this link is performing quite well. But for more in-depth analysis you’ll want to use UTM codes and Google Analytics.

The Short List of URL Shorteners
There’s more, but these are our current favorites.

• Bit.ly – Shorten, brand, & optimize links while tracking individual link analytics
• Goo.gl – Provided by Google with built-in individual link analytics
  
  • UPDATE: google is ending this service as of March 2018
• Rebrandly.com – Create & share short links with your domain name
• Ow.ly – Provided by Hootsuite with built in analytics
• Hiveam.com – Link management dashboard
• Tr.im – Link management dashboard

You may also appreciate this free redirect checker. This is useful if you're curious about a shortened link and you don't trust the source. 

Let us know if you have any questions below or tweet with #DigitalEvangelism.