There’s no other way to get around. Since the dawn of the internet links have been how you get from one place to another online. CLICK TO TWEET You can share links directly, embed them in “anchor text” like this, or use a custom link shortener to make your links branded and cool like this: Derric.link/Twitter (hey… follow me on Twitter while you are at it.) With the advent of Twitter and other social sharing platforms, lengthy URLs started to become a problem. Originally Twitter – who used to limit messages to 140 characters – counted all characters in a link. (Now it makes all links count as 23 characters), which meant sharing a URL like: htt/2016/29075/the-state-of-social-media-marketing-infographic Would eat up the entire Tweet… Unless you used a URL shortener. And Twitter did… Originally TinyURL was the URL shortener of choice for.
Twitter before the platform switched over to Bitly in November, 2009. Then Twitter eventually came out with their own URL Shortener: t.co. Designed to both protect users from malicious links and shorten lengthy URLs. Google followed Cork House Clearance Services suit by launching goo.gl in December 2009, and dozens of URL shorteners have followed in since then, all with varying features and revenue models. (Though, it’s worth noting that earlier this year Goo.gl announced it will be winding down its service). But aside from this early necessity of URL shorteners for Twitter “back in the day” what can URL shorteners do for you right now? What Can a URL Shortener Do? URL Shortener URL Shortening has come a long way since its inception in the year 2000. Here are a handful of pretty slick things you can do with your URL shortener today:
Link Masking Obviously shortening a URL allows you to mask the original web address. This is bad for us as consumers in the sense that it allows for spammers and hackers to hide malicious links from us. Thankfully, with security protection features from Chrome and other browsers (you use Chrome, right? You should…) we no longer have to worry about malicious link masking. Proper link masking might be where you take a URL from a strong piece of content that you are looking to share, and simplify it to portray a key point in your social message. For example: The original link is https://blog.bufferapp.com/the-top-100-social-media-blogs, which isn’t too ugly to begin with – but is too long to show on Twitter.