Why digital marketers should pay more attention to link shortening

Instead of having a link that looks like this:
http://www.thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/wearejustdoingthistobestupidnowsincethiscangoonforeverandeverandeverbutitstilllookskindaneatinthebrowsereventhoughitsabigwasteoftimeandenergyandhasnorealpointbutwehadtodoitanyways.html, a service like Bitly shortens it to this: http://bit.ly/2EnEgk.

But shortening URLs can also deliver a range of other benefits to digital marketers - among them, better tracking of customer behaviour and enhanced consumer brand recognition. Let's look at each of these benefits in turn.

Building brand recognition with custom link shortening

If you've spent much time on social media, you may have noticed that many big brands and publishers have custom shortened URL links, for example gu.com for The Guardian or nyt.ms for The New York Times. These custom links can be created using a service such as Bitly Enterprise.

The benefit for your brand is that you'll get brand impressions across social media, instant media and other channels when users share content from your website. It's automatic branding, even when the person who shared the link doesn't otherwise mention the brand in their email, tweet, or post.

Audience insight

But shortening also gives you new ways to get insight into which of your content is being clicked on, shared and acted on, right across the digital universe. Let's consider the example of social media.

On your own sites, you can easily track how many people are sharing, favouriting, pinning or liking your content using the chiclets embedded in your pages. But it's as important to be able to track whether people are clicking through to the content linked within those posts.

As nice as it is for your content to be shared, you do want people to start your customer journey by clicking on it. With link tracking, you can determine how effective shared social media content is at driving engagement with your links.

A nice feature to look for in an online reputation management suite is integration with link shortening solutions like Bitly. Radian6 from Salesforce.com, for example, includes the ability to launch the Bitly web application from the Engagement Console.

You can log in to your Bitly account and use your own custom Bitly accounts. With Bitly Stats, you can see stats around a specific Bitly link, which is a great way to track your own links and their growth.

Best practices

You can also use short URLs with analytics packages such as Google Analytics or Omniture to track campaigns, measure, tag, release, and monitor. If you track the topic of a link, when it's posted, where it's going, and so on, you can learn a lot that will help you create more popular, shareable and engaging content.

Link shortening, then, is a more powerful tool than many enterprises realise. There is a wealth of benefit to be found in tracking your shortened links in your online reputation management and analytics software. And depending on the size and industry of your business, custom short links could yield rewards, too.