Web Effectiveness Blog

Twitter posts or tweets (yuck) need short URLs to accommodate Twitter's 140 character limit.

Although you can use a third-party service to shorten your URLs – more on this later – you can also use the Redirect function in SiteExecutive to do the same thing.

For example, I published a press release yesterday about Systems Alliance expanding our Storage Consulting practice. The original URL for the press release is: http://www.systemsalliance.com/news/archive/SAI_PR_09_05_12.html. Way too long for Twitter. Using the Redirect function, I renamed the release www.systemsalliance.com/mocook – about 50% shorter. Because the Systems Alliance Website also points to the domain www.sysalli.com, my shortened URL was http://www.sysalli.com/mocook.

It takes less than one minute to create the shortened URL and redirect. All done through the SiteExecutive page creation interface – a partial screenshot is displayed below. If you're driving traffic to your site with Twitter, this is a great feature.

BTW, based on my search today, Google shows over 20 million hits for "shorten URLs for Twitter." There are a bunch of services available for this purpose – you'll find a article exploring 10 here.