If you’ve been following just about anyone on Twitter as part of your online marketing and promotion research, you’ve probably seen a TinyURL link. It’s the URL shortening Website that’s likely the most successful service to piggyback onto Twitter’s success.
So what is it, really? TinyURL is a Website that shortens URLs. That’s it. Say you want to send a blog post or a news story to someone on Facebook, or you want to tweet it on your online marketing and promotion Twitter account. The problem is, those social media sites don’t allow HTML tags, so you would have to simply copy and paste the whole URL. It may look something like:
http://www.organicsemseo.com/2009/05/22/twitter-for-business-what-you-need-to-know-to-get-started/
If you don’t want to count, that’s 98 characters. If you’re posting it on Twitter, that leaves you with only 42 characters to explain the link. And even if you’re posting to Facebook or another place for your online marketing and promotion campaign where message length isn’t as important, the link remains unwieldy and well, ugly.
TinyURL solves those online marketing and promotion problems by condensing that URL into—you guessed it—a tinier one. It will look something like this: http://tinyurl.com/ozkb2p.
And that’s great. But there’s another function to TinyURL that can be a powerful tool for anyone. By doing a simple Google or Twitter search for that shortened URL, users can see what popular URLs have been passed around and where they’re spreading to. You can track your own online marketing and promotion traffic, or just about any TinyURL traffic.
