Are URL Shorteners Good for Your Business?

Lately, I read a lot about URL shorter information, include the Exhaustive List of URL Shorteners, 10 Best URL Shorteners and whythey are good, URL Shorteners in Social Media: Pros and Cons. After reading the last one published by Kristina Weis, I decide to share some of my opinions.

My first used URL shortening service was 2011, at that time, I even had never heard of URL shorter. When I searched for a list of bookmark site, it recommended the bit.ly to me. Then, I opened my new account and found bit.ly had many functions. URL shorten and hidden, as well as sharing to other social networks. The click tracking function was developed later.

Nowadays, these URL shortening service are used by millions of people on internet marketing and social networking like twitter and Facebook. In fact, twitter has its own URL shortener, it can convert our URL to a short one. For hidden URL purpose, we don’t need to get extra characters by using other shortened URL service. However, twitter allows only 140 characters available to deliver the message a normal link can take up most of the space. Therefore, a list of URL Shorteners is available online. Additional, if you’re loyal fans of Google, you may find that Google has developed its own URL Shortener.

These shrinking URLs some of the services provide features that can be more useful than you may think. Most of them boast their tracking clicks like we do email marketing.

So, do you think it is a great way to spread your business by using these useful tools?

Kristina has described the advantages and disadvantages in his article. Most of users and that include me have never think about its cons. URL shorter, hidden, custom, share and click tracking, all these look nice.

“Less trust of your shortened link lead to decrease CTR, extra step that is a waste of time, URL shortening services may go down temporarily, lost the SEO value for your site.” said Kristina.

The true is that, we always want to know the real link not a short link as there are so many phishing and virus websites. They may hurt us a lot. We like the full URLs or at least part of the full URL so that we can know where it’s going to take us.

However, I don’t mean that these URL Shorteners are a waste of time. We can get benefits from them but we also need to use them properly. So what do you think about URL shorteners? Do you have a favorite one? Share in the comments.