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The top three URL shorteners for ReTweets

If you use Twit­ter at all you know that tweets really are the essence of tight-writ­ing, since you’ve only got 140 char­ac­ters to work with. If you’re plan­ning to include a link to oth­er web con­tent or leave space so that oth­ers can retweet your tweet, your char­ac­ter count drops further. Sav­in’ the tweet, one…

If you use Twit­ter at all you know that tweets really are the essence of tight-writ­ing, since you’ve only got 140 char­ac­ters to work with. If you’re plan­ning to include a link to oth­er web con­tent or leave space so that oth­ers can retweet your tweet, your char­ac­ter count drops further.

Sav­in’ the tweet, one char­ac­ter at a time
This is where URL shorten­ers come in, they’re ser­vices that take long URLs, such as:

https://blog.bradgrier.com/2007/07/17/online-backup-one-of-times-top-50-websites-for-2007/
(89 char­ac­ters, leav­ing 51 for your tweet)

and con­vert it to this:

http://ow.ly/r6T2
(18 char­ac­ters, leav­ing 122 for your tweet)

There’s short, and then there’s short
Every­one and his grandma has a URL shorten­er these days. If you use Google apps for Domains you can even set up your own URL shorten­er using Short Links. I don’t do this because bradgrier.com is already too long.

But if one of your goals is pub­lish your con­tent, as well as make it retweetable, then you want check out these three URL shortene­ing services:

Accord­ing to research recently released by Dan Zar­rella, tweets with links shortened by these ser­vices are more retweetable than oth­ers, with bit.ly being the best by a large margin.

What do I use?
In my case, I use ow.ly. It’s bundled with Hoot­suite, an online twit­ter man­age­ment applic­a­tion. Oh, yeah, they’re Cana­dian too 😉 but I digress.

My Goal
When I tweet, it’s simply to spread the word about some­thing I find inter­est­ing. Select­ing the ‘most retweetable’ URL shorten­er won’t give me a huge advant­age, but when you add it to  audi­ence con­sid­er­a­tion, time of day, and your tweet ‘head­line’, you’ll find it all adds up. Take a look at Dan’s report for more info. on retweet­ing, or look at the sum­mary item Fast Com­pany ran earli­er this week.

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Comments

2 responses to “The top three URL shorteners for ReTweets”

  1. Adam Snider Avatar
    Adam Snider

    Is bit.ly really bet­ter, or is it just more com­monly used? Could­n’t the reas­on that tweets with bit.ly links are retweeted more often simply be because bit.ly is used more often and, thus, there are more tweets (and, by exten­sion, retweets) with bit.ly links than with links cre­ated by oth­er link-short­en­ing services?

    Per­son­ally, I prefer is.gd for the simple fact that the URLs are slightly short­er, giv­ing me an extra char­ac­ter to write my tweets (and, as I’m sure you know, some­times that one char­ac­ter makes all the dif­fer­ence). Plus, it’s one of the ser­vices that’s pre-built into Tweetdeck.

    Reply
  2. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    Hey Adam, I’m think­ing that bit.ly is ‘bet­ter’ because it’s the one that is the default shorten­er for so many Twit­ter applic­a­tions. I think Twit­ter itself uses bit.ly as the shorten­er-de-jour. It’s also got a huge recog­ni­tion factor going for it, which helps with credibility.

    Because of its default status, more people use it, and more retweets are gen­er­ated with bit.ly URLs inside.

    As for best, I don’t think so. Tr.im, ow.ly and oth­ers have bet­ter ana­lyt­ics built in.

    And yeah, I like short­er bet­ter, wherever pos­sible. I need stat­ist­ics for some of what I do, so have to stick with ser­vices that provide them, but is.gd is awe­some in that it’s light and effective.

    Reply

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