Social Media Marketing is all about attracting the attention of the audience, and URL shorteners are not something to be missed.
Social Media Marketing, nowadays, utilizes each and every means for engaging with the audience. Although there are so many things to look out for, none of them is lesser than the others.
A very important factor that can really make-or-break the whole marketing campaign is how you present the URLs to your website while marketing it.
How many of you are going to click on this link? “https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10661337/expanding-a-shortened-url-to-its-original-full-length-url-in-java”, and how many will likely click this one? “shorturl.at/iqwU1”.
Do you know both of these URLs will land you on the same page? Well, the latter looks quite simple and possibly virus-free, however, the former had a scary outlook, at least for me.
Immediately one benefit is evident that shortened URLs are more likely to get clicked by the visitor as compared to the lengthier one. Furthermore, there are several other reasons, for which you shouldn’t ignore the URL shortening, especially for social media marketing.
This is what we are going to talk about in this article, in addition to providing you the top 3 URL shortening services out there.
So, get ready to boost your social media campaign through the use of incredible, eye-catching, interesting short URLs, instead of long, scary, useless URLs.
9 Reasons Why URL Shorteners Are Important In Social Media Marketing
1. Tracking Number of Clicks
Perhaps the biggest advantage of using a shortened URL is that the service which provides you the shortened URL additionally provides the number of clicks that the URL has received.
One of the main ideas behind social media marketing is to get the knowledge of how many people are actually visiting or clicking your provided URL. Maintaining a track without using a shortened URL is quite difficult and requires special programming knowledge.
However, this feature is provided by almost all URL shorteners out there. Hence, analysis of the traffic can now be easily done without any kind of head-scratching programming. I personally use it all the time as i have an internet routers website. So, I track traffic coming from a source point.
2. Tracking The Location and Time Of Clicks
In addition to providing the number of clicks, some URL shortening services provide location and time data of clicks as well.
Therefore, you can know the geography from where the traffic is coming and even the time on the clock when your advertisement yields the most fruitful results or unfortunately doesn’t get clicked at all.
This kind of analysis can surely help you tune and focus your advertisement according to the geographical background of the visitors. Moreover, the time information can help you establish better customer support timings if any visitor wants a quick chat.
3. Make Your Brand More Visible
Enough for the analysis of traffic data, shortened URLs can contain your brand and/or product names, communicating to the visitor what he’ll visit even before he clicks it.
Instead of longer, gibberish-containing URLs, how nice would it be if all the URLs in your advertisement clearly showcase your brand name and the relevant products?
Definitely, viewers are more likely to click these customized short URLs instead of normal URLs that won’t make any sense in the first look.
4. Routing Traffic To Your Website
The main idea behind a social media campaign or advertisement is to direct the audience to your website or the product page. The short URLs play an important role in achieving this re-routing by tempting visitors via attractive names.
Normally, you’ll want visitors to have a look at some other products on your website, in addition to the one for which you are advertising. Therefore, incorporating a shortened URL of other products can give users an easy option to view a few other products available on your page.
Therefore, the advertisement for the main product can be effectively used for showcasing a few other products which might interest the visitors, hence increasing the inflow of the traffic.
5. Attract Audience By Using Words-Of-Mouth
A simple rule is, if people can say it, it means they can remember it, and if they can remember it, then they can connect with it and pass it to others as well.
Therefore, even the shortened URL doesn’t mean it can be remembered and passed on easily, it has to be a more memorable URL using relevant words.
So, now you have to look for words that can represent the overall crux of the linking page and can also represent the content in an easy and more useful way. Make sure these words are easy to pronounce and associate with instead of difficult tongue-twisters, or on the contrary, they can even be strange words that sit into the readers’ mind promptly.
6. Increase Clicking By Using Reader-Friendly Words
In the words of Faisal Rehman is a Freelance Systems Administrator and a writer at softwarespice.com who knows how to start a successful blog:
For the general audience, simple straightforward words make more sense than some technical jargon. However, for tech-savvy readers, technical words would be much better and attractive.
Therefore, depending on the readers you are aiming for, try to use relevant reader-friendly words so that you have better chances of getting the reader’s attention.
So, get to know the audience and decide the target audience then use the relevant words to generate your custom shortened URL.
7. Include Screenshots and Short Video With Ease
Do you know that not even the lengthy URLs but screenshots and short videos can also be shared on the social media marketing pages?
Just like the shortened URL generators, some generators have this capability, so they can upload and generate shortened customized URLs against images and short videos.
You can embed catchy short URLs and if the visitor clicks it then instead of taking them to another webpage, an image or a short video is displayed to them, that contains more of the advertisement material.
8. Easy To Find Content
Using any short URL generator has certain downsides associated. For example, some generators don’t allow customized short URLs whereas those which do allow charge you annually.
On the contrary, there are services that allow you to use your own domain name in the short URL. This brings two-fold benefits to the generated URLs.
Firstly, you can change the destination URL whenever you want, keeping the front URL the same. Secondly, you can use your own domain name that will allow the readers to focus their attention if they are specifically looking for your brand. Moreover, readers will remember and associate with your brand name and it will settle in their minds.
9. Secure Audience Trust
Whenever the reader will see a short URL containing your brand name, or words specific to your products, they will instantly know that it has been signed by you.
Moreover, you can buy domain names and hosting of famous sites to catch the reader’s attention and once they click the link, it’ll take them to your webpage.
For example, you can purchase the domain name “Snapchat.hacks”, and link your page containing tips and hack about Snapchat with this or a bit modified URL, such as “Snapchat.hacks/5-tips-to-get-likes”.
Final Words
Shortened URLs can serve multiple purposes and help you reach and engage a large audience via social media marketing. So, do consider these as one of the tools for effective online advertising. But sometimes if your url is like one word e.g doubleyourline, then in this case it depends on you whether you wanna use shorteners or not. You can find a number of free online services that can generate short URLs, so no matter which service you use, keep us posted about its experience through the comments sections.
