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How To Optimize Your Link URLs For Twitter
As an online retailer you need to get involved with social networking sites in order to make a connection with your customers on a personal level, and provide the kind of interactive service that people are looking for and that builds trust.
The problem is, if you want to provide someone with a link back to your site, especially if it is deeply embedded in your site, such as a product page of a how-to article, you can consume as much as half of your 140 characters with your URL. That leaves very little tweeting space to set up the reason for the link, establish the personal connection and so on.
For every Internet problem, there is an Internet entrepreneur who has figured out a way to solve that problem. You can now subscribe to a service that is essentially a link clipper. These services assign a much shorter URL to your long and cumbersome URL and when someone clicks on the short URL, they redirect according to your original URL.
As this new approach grows, so has the number of companies offering the service. The original TinyURL has quickly been followed by over 90 other offerings.
You will find that many of the services offer some interesting additional options such as:
- Customizing your shortened URL
- Password-protecting the URL
- Automatically detect broken links
- Count clicks
- Get a page preview
There are some issues to beware off when considering a link shortening service.
Monetization
Many services are trying to monetize their service by taking the clicker to a brief advertisement before moving them to your URL. Others are adding a small banner advertisement onto your site. Neither of these techniques is particularly good for your business since they disrupt your link to your customer and you are not in control of what is being advertised.
But, never fear, these entrepreneurs get that part, too. Some link shorteners suggest that if you join at a premium membership rate, you can avoid the intrusion of advertising in exchange for the link shortening.
Service
The tools add another layer to the process of navigating the Web, potentially leaving a trail of broken links if a service suddenly stops operating. They can also make it harder to tell what you're really clicking on, which may make these very small links attractive to spammers and scammers.
The advantages are strong but the tradeoffs are considerable. If you believe that shortening your URLs would be helpful to you, you should think about choosing a service that minimizes the risks.
For example, choose a company that has an automatic broken link detector. Second, work with a company that provides a page preview so the person clicking on the URL can be assured that they are being taken to the right place. Given that these offerings are subject to scamming, you do not want to inadvertently send a potential customer to an unsavory site.
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