My employer, RateItAll, recently launched some enhanced sharing tools with the goal of maximizing distribution via email, Facebook, and Twitter.
I will likely share more of the specifics of what we did in regards to sharing in a future post, as I think we're doing some neat things.
As part of our Twitter project, we decided to build our own URL shortener as opposed to using an existing service like Bit.ly or TinyURL.
Here are the reasons we did this:
- It preserves our brand in tweets. Our brand happens to say exactly what we do. It's a description of the service, and hopefully, a means to attract new users. We felt it was important that our brand be preserved as our service gets tweeted and retweeted.
- It was easy. Setting this up for four different types of links took us a few hours.
- We have a fairly short domain name. By using our own URL as opposed to Bit.ly's, we don't lose all that much in terms of saving space against a 140 character limit.
- It protects us against third party services deciding to change the rules. To its credit, Bit.ly is currently a search engine friendly redirect, meaning that link juice appropriately gets transferred to the destination domain. There's no guarantee that Bit.ly will stay that way.
You can see our sharing tools and url shortener in action on this page about Star Trek characters.
For more technical posts on URL shorteners, see Joshua Schachter and Danny Sullivan.
