TinyURL shortens a long Web address into something smaller, memorable, usable, and marketable. Along with the imitators that followed, the concept is a killer and TinyURL.com is a good place to start.
Practical applications
1. Twitter gives you 140 characters.
Twitter makes each character precious. On Twitter you’d use up your entire update with a long URL.
Go to TinyURL, insert the looong URL, and out pops a 24-character one. Makes a big difference when you want to set up the reason why your follower should click on the hyperlink you post.
2. Easier to customize and remember.
If you ask me to help you with marketing, I ask you to read The First Three Questions first. The article features the first three questions I’m going to ask you before we get started. To hyperlink to the story (before TinyURL) I would have to:
* Come to my website
* Use the search feature on the top right hand corner
* Type in “the first three”
* Get all the results (including the ones where the story is linked to)
* Scroll down
* Select the URL
* Copy https://joehageonline.com/2008/05/03/marketing-strategy-the-first-three-questions/
* Paste it into my communication
Eight steps. Tonight I realized that I could go to TinyURL and create a small, memorable string. So I went in and created http://tinyurl.com/First3.
I’ll never forget it. I’ll never have to look it up again. Heck, you may even remember it and recommend it to a friend.
3. No more broken links
I recently did some fundraising for the Seattle Heart Walk, benefiting the American Heart Association.
Here is the string for my donation page: http://www.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=260789&lis=0&kntae260789=7555D15BA0FB4E269DF03E92C448DD09&supId=184963211
Not all browsers are savvy enough to recognize that the link extends that far. The string is so long that it wraps (as it did here) from one line to the next.
Frustrating.
With TinyURL, that problem goes away.
4. Free Marketing
Back to our fund raising example. Cardiac Science ran a promotion: sponsor any Cardiac Science employee and be eligible to win a free AED defibrillator (click here to learn more about why your child’s school needs one).
So I created a URL to market the benefit: http://tinyURL.com/WinAED
Which one is a better marketing communication?
Win an AED at http://tinyurl.com/WinAED
– or –
Win an AED at http://www.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=260789&lis=0&kntae260789=7555D15BA0FB4E269DF03E92C448DD09&supId=184963211
P.S. Sorry, Elizabeth, someone else won.
In a future post, I’ll talk about a TinyURL imitator that, as far as I can tell, has a distinct advantage versus TinyURL.
Are you already using this or a similar application? If so, share with my readers what you use and why.
Rats, I was not the winner…but still happy to donate to a great cause.
Hey Joe,
If you like TinyURL, you ought to check out BudURL. The best benefit of BudURL is that it enables you to track click throughs on the links you create which great for figuring out how many people actually read your tweats.
Elge
Elge, you beat me to it! I *just* discovered BudURL last night from a fellow Tweeter.
I’m eager to try it out.
Thanks Joe, was wondering beyond Twitter doing this where I could create the tiny URL.
Thanks, Bob. I find points two and four very compelling reasons to use TinyURL beyond Twitter.
I’ve been using snipurl.com and love it for the same reasons and the fact that it tracks both unique and total clickthroughs.
Very helpful not just for seeing what’s popular, but also for which resources people keep going back to.
The next killer app? TinyUrl has been around forever and a day.
Cool; I’ve used Tiny URL for ages, but never really customized the URLs it made.
A long list of URL shorteners:
http://tr.im/2isi
Just saw this at mashable.com
Just because Twitter applications are relatively easy to build doesn’t mean they’re simple to monetize. In fact, we’ve seen a deluge of Twitter apps invade the Twittersphere, making our Twitter-holic lives easier with iPhone apps, apps to manage multiple accounts, and a myriad of desktop apps. Let’s face it, Twitter apps are practically in excess.
Sure Tweetdeck was able to raise money, but most Twitter apps won’t find the same fate. Case in point, a very successful Twitter app developer and maker of 11 apps — two of which are extremely popular — is ready to close up shop. The apps are currently for sale, and their destiny has yet to be determined.
Another good case study is Tr.im. The URL shortener owes its very existence to the need for tiny URLs in tweets, and yet found it impossible to monetize. So Tr.im decided to shut down, slam Twitter in the process, and saw a huge panic over the potential for lost links. Bit.ly offered to swoop in to the rescue, but Tr.im wasn’t having it. They eventually decided to open up shop again, and ultimately went open source with Nambu renouncing ownership.
If successful and functional Twitter apps are having a hard time making a mint, we’re pretty sure the lesser known and less useful ones aren’t doing so well either. You can expect more of these sad tales in the months ahead.