Blog6 February 2020

A URL shortener, as the name indicates, is a tool that reduces the size of a link by compressing the address of a web page. If you work with digital marketing or have a social media strategy, you know that it’s not always possible to share the original links to your site or blog. And the main reason is the lack of space in the publication. So using a URL shortener is key.

Advantages of shortening URL

There are many pros and cons of using URL shorteners but these are some of them:

  1. The length of the URL is very important on Twitter: It is for this reason that we need to shorten URL, as this way we can write more content in our tweets.
  2. More complete analytics: The shorteners have evolved so much that they allow you to access complete analytics of the shortened links, but not only based on the clicks obtained but indicating their social origin (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), thus the country of origin in many other things
  3. Better visual aspect: “The chorizos” of URL negatively affect our brand image in the social environment.
  4. Better customization: You can customize the URL to your liking
  5. You can analyze the competition: The public use of these links shared in Social Networks makes it an effective tool to see the social popularity in clicks of a certain link, long before we publish it. We can also use it to analyze the social traffic of other blogs similar to ours.

Disadvantages of shortening URL

  1. Prolonged life ?: Since they were born a few years ago, dozens of URL shorteners were created, which over time and years many of them were closing their service leaving many URLs out of operation, or worse, the Domain became an adult service.
  2. Mistrust: Failure to see the URL where you click can generate some distrust, hence the most popular shorteners have advantages over other cutting tools that start now.
  3. Spam: If the domain of the tool that you have used in the URLs you wanted to shorten is considered as spam, all your links will automatically be spam with the following damage to your brand image on social networks.

I hope this post on tools and programs to shorten URLs or links will be very useful for your social media strategy.