URL shortening and why it's important to brands
Links are the lifeblood of the internet.
Social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook are giving people the power to 'spread' content that they like and that they think their friends and followers will like.
Because of the 140 character constraint, links to content invariably are fed into url shortening solutions. There are over 100 such solutions online right now.
URL shorteners are very simple, they take a url such as:
http://inside.nike.com/blogs/nikefootball-en_GB/2009/05/20/razor-sharp
and shorten it to become something like this:
http://nike.com/u/2/a (this doesn't work by the way)
The benefits are huge:
It enables you to take your brand into these areas (e.g. http://nike.com/ and not http://tinyurl.com/) - This is free advertising.
It increases trust and click-through rates. e.g. You know that clicking on it will take you to something to do with nike.
It enables you to track where and how people are finding your content by ensuring you're adding the necessary meta data and tracking info to the links you are shortening.
One way to try this out in a cost effective way is by using http://awe.sm. For $99 a year you get 10,000 unique urls a month, all tracked by Google Analytics and customisable by you.
