Link shorteners are one the best tools that have been created for the digital world. With just easy steps, any long URL (Uniform Resource Locator) link can be reduced to a few characters, which are the miracle of community managers, social media strategists, business owners, and even those teens with thousands of followers on TikTok. But what are these shorteners, and how do they work? Keep reading to find out!

Read: Branding: What is it, and how does it benefit your business?

What are link shorteners?

To put it pretty simple, they transform any URL link into a short and simple link, easy to use on any website. Still, moreover, they are the perfect pair for social media. These links will redirect users to the main website, helping a lot with the characters count. This is because many social media platforms have a limit within their texts, information, or bio of any account. The main attractiveness of the shorteners is being able to create a custom link that will be under the company’s branding. 

They create a redirect to the long URL, redirecting HTTP response codes, requests that a URL sends through any internet browser to a web server to open a specific website. Short or long URLs are different starting points from where the internet browser can reach the desired website or page. The better response codes are the ones that use a permanent 301 redirect to help with the SEO rankings. 

Short links are easy to handle, manage and remember. Who will place those long and difficult links, but if businesses and accounts start to use shorteners to create easy links, especially ones connected to the brand, these will be perfectly remembered. Plus, use them everywhere, from the about us on any social media profile to business cards. After all, they are small and cute to appear with the brand image. 

Many URL shorteners can offer any user the ability to track the links and present metrics that are the best friends of social media administrators and marketers. Also, they are a great help with social media platforms such as Twitter that has a limit in their tweets of only 280 characters, normally they offer to cut the link, but in any tweet, a short link looks better. All these take us to show you the best shorteners in the digital world. Check them out!

List of link shorteners

These are the most used and famous shorteners out there. Many businesses and brands use them to show the content and keep branding. There is the list:

Ow.ly

This is the shortener presented by Hootsuite. For that reason, this is included in all their plans, even the free version. Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media marketing and management platforms, so having integrated a shortener helps to have a bigger vision of how the brand’s performance is overall and check the short links metrics and the social media analytics.

Bitly

Bitly is the second most used shortener nowadays. The interesting thing with this one is the many tools that offer with only the free version. You can access many metrics like demographics and even numbers of clicks. Upgrading to basic and enterprise plans besides the stated tools, you can also find branded links, QR Codes, multiple users, and so much more. 

Tiny URL

This one doesn’t look like the most professional one. Still, it’s highly powerful and offers customization without even having an account there. The only problem is that you forget about metrics and analytics. Still, the cool thing is that you can add the browser extension and use it for any website that you’re browsing at that moment. 

Rebrandly

Here you can short links and have a custom domain that allows you to have your brand everywhere, even in small URLs. All these are even with a free account, but if you want to track them, have metrics with analytics, and other tools, you can pay for one of the different packages that they offer. 

Hyperlink

Here we find a different shortener. This one is an app and a Chrome extension. With Hyperlink, you can get notifications every time that a user clicks your link. You can configure the account to deliver daily, weekly or monthly summaries. It can also give information about the device, location, and other referral information of each visitor. The dashboard is of great help, and they present several plans from free to the ones with payments starting at $39 per month. 

Using link shorteners can help your brand in many ways, but marketers and social media managers are their best friends. Trust us when we say that they will be amazing for the different strategies and posts in any social media account. Check out more amazing tools with 786 Magazine!

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