Social networks and various online tools often do not allow the displaying of entire links or URLs, and they need to be shortened. For example, Twitter does this automatically, while some others need to shorten web paths (URLs) on their own.
Trying to convince people to click on a long, messy link is almost as bad as a door-to-door salesperson trying to sell people financial services. If your audience sees a link they think they do not want in one of your social media posts, they will do the digital equivalent by slamming the door in your face – scroll next to it. This can cause issues when trying to improve social media marketing.
An additional problem with long links or links is that they look like something that will take you to some “bad” page, and shortening them solves that problem and allows you better passability when creating content for your web or email. To avoid being perceived as unwanted or messy when you have a legitimate link to share, check out our list of the top six link shorteners that will cut your links into clean, consistent, and clickable URLs.
Contents of Post
1. Branded Link Shortener
Branded Link Shortener is a straightforward tool that you can use in many ways. For example, if you own your e-commerce store and want to send customers information about current promotions, all you have to do is shorten the link with the discount catalog and send such a shortened link to your contacts. Or, if you are running an affiliate program, you could use it to assign a particular short link to each of your affiliates so they could share it with their customers.
With this tool, you can engage with your customers on a different level, share how many links you need, and track everything. You can use it for a Facebook ad, put it into your newsletter, use it in a webinar presentation or on a blog. Almost everywhere.
You can also get a reseller license to create ten additional full accounts with it. You can resell these accounts and keep all earnings. Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it.
2. Bit.ly
There is one more platform that grows your business. Bit.ly is a link shortening platform with a comprehensive dashboard that displays performance metrics for your links, such as click-through rates, channel statistics, and geographic information of people who click on your links.
They also offer branded links and integrations with social media management software such as Sprinklr, Sprout Social, Buffer, Hootsuite, and HubSpot to help you seamlessly distribute your abbreviated links to your social media profiles.
Bit.ly’s free account offers up to 1,000 unbranded links and link reporting over 30 days, ideal for small businesses. Their business plan allows you to tag 3,000+ links per month and provides all of the above data and metrics, which is best for large companies looking to organize and track every link in their marketing campaigns.
3. TinyURL
If you are looking for a simple and effective tool for shortening links, then the TinyURL is right for you. It does not offer as many features as Bitly. It is one of the first URL shorteners, created in 2002. It provides options such as customized URLs and Full Link History. Just type in the long URL, and in a few moments, you will have your TinyURL
4. Rebrandly
Rebrandly is a fantastic URL shortener like all the other apps on our list, but its appeal is unique. In Rebrandly, they believe that brands, whether product or person, gain value by tailoring links to content that directs them from across the web.
Their free plan offers five custom domains so that you can customize the entire short URL, not just the last half.
It includes tools to track the popularity of each link, information on who clicks them, and automatic generation of QR codes. You are limited to a total of 500 branded links and 5,000 clicks tracked per month on the free package – but that is enough if you are just getting started.
Rebrandly also integrates with Zapier so that you can do things like automatically generate short, highlighted links for new WordPress posts or Dropbox files
5. Ow.ly
Developed from the social networking management platform Hootsuite, Ow.ly is a link shortener included in every free Hootsuite account. With Ow.ly, you can distribute your links and track their performance metrics directly on the Hootsuite platform, allowing you to shorten each link to all of your social media profiles.
Ow.ly is an excellent option for anyone who already uses Hootsuite as their social media management platform.
6. Shortny – the URL Shortener
Our next entry is for those who are comfortable with PHP scrips. Shortny, the URL shortener that reduces the amount of bloat found in other URL shorteners and offers a straightforward solution that does the job.
From the frontend side, users can: create an abbreviated URL, password protect the link, copy and share the link, see link statistics, and much more. On the backend page, the web administrator can: see statistics, delete any URLs and edit website settings and ads.
Conclusion
Using a link in the text that does not have many characters, that link does not distort the text formatting and visual appearance.
When we use a link with multiple characters, then the appearance of that link is not reviewed or visually acceptable. The problem is even more visible when we use links to publish where we have a limited number of characters, e.g., on Twitter, where the link itself would often use all allowed characters per post.
Fortunately, there are online services called “Link shortener”. Some of them were presented through this article and their main goal is to solve the problem related to the long URL-s. The principle is the same for everyone, we enter a long link, and as a final result, we get a shortened link that points to the same content only much shorter. Try it!
