Link Shortening: The Secret Weapon in Social Media Marketing

Social Media is a great place where you can build your brand by creating loyal followers of your own. You can use social media to build a seven-figure business for your brand.

The best way to use social media is to promote your products or services by sharing your product or service link. But the only problem that comes is that social media may not necessarily allow you to share the link especially when the link is too long.

This is where link shortening comes into play. With link shortening you can easily shorten that long URL and share it on your social media– and it’s the secret weapon in your social media marketing.

In this post, we’ll find out the origin of link shortening, illustrate why it’s so important to your current social media marketing campaigns, and finally show you how to harness its potential for your gain. Let’s get started!

A Very Brief History of the URL

Let’s dwell on the history of URLs to understand how link shortening came to be. Between 1989 and 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, developing HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and the URL.

The Internet grew into what we know now when the Internet was open to the public. Now fast forward 10 years, and the first URL redirection service (V3.com) was set up. This helped many webmasters by preventing broken links and helped guide navigation into and out of the web pages through short URLs.

After the year 2000, the internet got its boom and many tech companies got burned out of this. Many tech companies include social media companies as well such as Photobucket, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc.

Soon marketing turns towards this website to share links and build customers. Twitter launched around the same time with its 140-character limit. This presented a brand-new challenge for long URLs adding more motivation for finding a way to shorten them, revamp them, and track them.

In early 2000, the internet became faster and faster which enabled them to connect to the internet. With increased internet speed display size also improved bringing in more and more inches to the screen.

The internet has now evolved into a versatile, powerful marketing tool – strung together by that one small detail we tend to forget about – the URL.

Why URL Shortening Has Become Vital?

In the earlier days of the internet, users didn’t have to worry a lot about URLs. It was only software engineers who had to bother about using, cloaking, or tracking them.

But things changed when more and more complexity was added resulting in URLs becoming longer and longer. This is where URL-shortening software came into existence.

 Link shortening makes the whole process more manageable, and enables you to squeeze more links into the same space. It’s ability to track, shorter URLs, etc became invaluable for your digital marketing campaigns.

The Perfect WordPress Link Shortening Tool

If you are using a WordPress website then using a link-shortening tool becomes tenfold easier as there is a plugin that facilitates your link-shortening.

Using a third-party service may sound daunting however, there are a lot of drawbacks such as less control over the link creation process, learning curve, etc.

Pretty Links is a WordPress plugin that can help you with hassle-free link shortening, giving you the control, you require, and also offers the tracking functionality you’ll need.

It offers Social links, redirects, and affiliate links are all taken care of, and no coding experience is required. you simply have to purchase, install, and activate the plugin.

Conclusion

The internet had a huge curve of technological advancement that helped the world in gaining a lot of traction, especially the businesses.

In all the advancements, one thing that is often overlooked is URLs. The URL is at the heart of web technology, and by extension, link shortening. A versatile, inexpensive tool such as Pretty Links that unlocks its potential is vital to any WordPress user. Here is a quick recap for you:

• The URL is often overlooked, but in reality, it’s at the heart of web connectivity
• Link shortening and cloaking is a secret weapon in social media marketing
• For better management of the URL, link shortening has become a widely accepted technology
• Unwieldy URLs should be replaced with short, pretty ones, and tracking and managing them needs to be easy.