URL Shorteners: Are They Part of Your Social Media & Content Strategy?

How can a URL shortener impact your overall content strategy?  Don't they just shrink URLs?

I remember the appearance of the first URL shortener, TinyURL, shortly after their debut in 2002.  It seemed like a novelty.  There were times that I wanted to share a link that got broken with page breaks in emails.  Beyond that, what was the use?

Then Twitter arrived.  A world that lived and died by the value of character counts.  Every single character became precious real estate.  Finally, the solution of URL shorteners had found their problem.

Tons of these services soon popped up, each with their own selling points and clever names.  Several have already folded.  Like many other web services, they are made or destroyed by The Default. 

Until May 2009, the default URL shortener for Twitter was TinyURL.  The new default, Bit.ly, has ridden Twitter's wave of popularity to become the dominant service.  To get an idea of the scale of the operation, ponder this:  Bit.ly shortened 2.1 billion links in November 2009, as reported by TechCrunch.

At the end of 2009, Google got into the game by putting a URL shortener into Google Toolbar, FeedBurner, and their web browser, Chrome.  (It's not currently available outside of those places.) Other sites have exclusive shorteners, too, like Facebook (fb.me) and YouTube (YouTu.be).  When you share a link from those places, those short, branded domains will be used.

Not to be outdone by a Google announcement, Bit.ly announced that it was partnering with some serious heavyweights (New York Times, AOL, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, etc.) to offer a Pro service in limited private Beta. Benefits include: Custom URLs (ex.: nytm.es) and analytics in real-time.

The option to bake a shortener into your CMS that allows you to create a short URL of your choice, domain and all.  This is considerably more heavy lifting than the free services already out there, but offers its own set of benefits.

Why does any of this matter?

Something as seemingly innocuous as a URL shortener must figure into the social media portion of a comprehensive content strategy.  There are many, many options, and the decision on which one to use must be carefully considered.  While not as important as a content audit or the choice of a CMS, the benefits of choosing the right URL shortener are clear:

• Solid, useful metrics
• Contribute to (rather than hamper) your SEO strategy
• Prevention of link rot
• Provide the best user experience
• Reinforce branding
• Security/confidence

The metrics component alone may be the make-or-break feature.  Most site analytics suites can track in-bound traffic from Twitter.com.  Since 30% of Twitter-related link-clicking traffic comes from third-party applications like TweetDeck or Tweetie, tracking the links from the shortener end becomes considerably more important.  Some of the services offer more analytics features, and they are quickly improving them.

Certain shorteners use different types of HTTP traffic redirects to point to your original URL.  Some properly refer the traffic and maintain your hard-fought SEO efforts, others do not.  Most of the major players play by the rules and refer the traffic on a permanent basis and do not recycle links.  Watch out for those.

What constitutes the best user experience is always up for debate.  Certain shorteners like the Diggbar and HootSuite's ow.ly shortener use frames.  While there may be some UX benefits with frames for users, they can also confuse and distract.  There is the potential for the frame-based shorteners to cause metrics and SEO issues as well.

Shorteners are only as trustworthy as those using them.  We've been taught to avoid unfamiliar links in emails for as long as phishing has been around.  Selecting a service that uses a familiar or custom-branded URL domain will give people the confidence to click without fear of spam or malware.


So, indeed, it does matter.

What may have been something destined to be a footnote in the history of The Internets is now something vital to a strong social media strategy, and by extension, content strategy.

Speaking of shortening...

( "some people say I am obsessed with my lawn" image from Jez Page / Flickr (cc:by-nc-sa))

Is your content ATOMIC CONTENT?

According to Wikipedia, the concept of physical things being constructed out of smaller, indivisible units, or elements, has been around for about 2,600 years.  Science confirmed this about 200 years ago.  Atoms can be broken down further, but any division past that atomic level and the element ceases to be an element.

Why the science lesson?  What does this have to do with content?  I have taken us all back to the science classroom because elements and atoms are a rather fitting analogy.  This element is not on the periodic table: it is known as...Content.

From a production point of view, content has almost always started from the single, discrete piece.  From there, each piece has been combined to make a larger component.  For example, think of a newspaper article: an election story might appear in the politics section of the Monday edition of the local paper.

For newspapers, selling single stories at the newsstand was a tough proposition.  Selling the politics section was too narrow of an appeal.  But, if you put that into a larger framework, a whole newspaper with sports scores and weather and classifieds and advertisements, it starts to make more sense.

The same hierarchy existed for many years on public radio.  A six minute feature was produced, then included in the larger framework of an hour-long show, and on a select day, broadcast on a radio station.  The production direction from small piece to large framework was it.  That was before the advent of on-demand listening and podcasts.

For some, peeling off one layer of that hierarchy to adapt to online consumption habits was seen as enough.  If producers took an hour-long show and placed it online, the work was done.  No additional production required.  Easy.  Take the same hour-long chunk that airs on radio stations and make it available online via on-demand and podcasting.  But that is not serving the needs of the people that actually consume the content.

Using the newspaper example again, imagine that you want to share an article with a friend.  Do you point them to the stack of old newspapers in the garage from the last month? Or the whole newspaper from Monday?  Or the Politics section from Monday? The easier way would be to clip the article out, and give them that specific thing you wish to share.  Your friend will know exactly what you want them to see.

The same thing happens in public radio.  Some programs are two or more hours long, built out of smaller segments.  Wouldn't it be ideal to have those segments in an easy-to-share format online?  And wouldn't it be great if you could comment on those individual segments?  Of course.  There are plenty of reasons to publish content at the segment level for consumption online:

• Accurate, focused metadata can be attached
• Proper taxonomy can be applied in the CMS
  
• It is SEO-friendly, increasing discover-ability
  
• It becomes much more easily shared via social media
  
• Easier to output via API, RSS, podcast, widgets, etc.
• Quickly becoming industry standard and convention
• People are beginning to demand it of content producers
  
• It just makes sense

There are reasons NOT to do it, too.  Some obstacles you may encounter:

• Not in current workflows
  
• More attention is required
• More steps in publishing process
• Current CMS not equipped to handle it
  
• Current outputs not configured to handle it [website, feeds, etc.]
  
• Greater opportunity for user-input error

The benefits are far too great not to put forth the effort to overcome the obstacles in the way of segment-level nirvana.

Author and blogger Seth Godin has made a mantra out of the phrase "Ideas that spread, win."  If your idea, in the shape of content, can spread, it can win!  Not a jackpot lottery win, but the kind of win that content wants: to be consumed and shared easily.

Atomic segment-level publishing, FTW!