November 9
How to Protect Your URL in a Social Media World
by Emile Daigle
Co-authored by Yuval Zukerman, Sr. Consultant, Emerging Interactions, Molecular
Social media has come to play a key role in brand messaging, with the strong two-year climb of microblogging service Twitter adding a new twist: a 140-character limit. This restriction has pushed adoption of a few common ways to cram more message into less space. Apart from heavily leveraging the new language of texting shorthand born of the mobile SMS, the biggest trend in use is employing short URLs to save space while linking to other online content.
Short URLs are hinged on service providers like tr.im and TinyURL that allow people to generate unique links, usually formed of a small domain name followed by a hash and a series of apparently random characters that the service provider responds to with a redirect to the longer target link. For example, the provider tr.im may provide a link of the form http://tr.im/zpBD that points visitors to http://molecularvoices.molecular.com/category/data-and-analytics/, saving us 48 characters to talk about how insightful the latest blog post is.
The advantages to end users are clear enough, but the disadvantages to content providers are not. Cautionary tales of short URL service collapse have been floating around for years, but the message doesn’t mean much to the people socializing those millions of YouTube videos and Flickr photos. The people contributing all that traffic to your site aren’t as concerned as the marketing department with how long the link stays around; the internet zeitgeist waits for no one. As marketing professionals, here are a few things you should know to help you better understand short URLs and why you should consider owning your own short URLs to power your brand.
