How URL Shorteners Facilitate Internal & Business Communications

Do you want to achieve your business objectives and enhance internal communications as a business owner? Start creating clear, clickable shortcuts out of lengthy, complicated URLs by using URL shorteners.

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Flights that are long-haul and have some whiny babies on them. A lengthy line at the bank if you need to take out a quick loan. Social media posts that are too long and uninteresting for anyone to read…. The worst of all these annoying appearances are lengthy URLs, usually known as links.

Your URLs may get clumsy, confusing, and distracting the longer they are. The added work of deciphering the disorganized “mess” of lengthy URLs merely bothers our minds. For a company that depends on linkages for both internal communication and external sales and income generation, this isn’t welcome news.

The only exit routes? Links with a clear, understandable, and clickable design. Presenting URL shorteners, our superhero saviors!

An Outline of What a URL Shortener Is

A platform, website, or application that allows you to drastically shorten lengthy URLs is known as a URL shortener (sometimes called a link shortener). It accomplishes this by condensing the web page address to something that’s easier to comprehend and distribute. Redirecting URLs is the fundamental foundation of URL-shortening services. As a result, the freshly generated short link continues to direct you to the precise same website.

The following are the reasons why links are shortened:

• They are simpler to get in the head and appear more correct;
• They are simpler to quote, particularly on social media platforms like Twitter, where post length is constrained;
• They make it simpler to type or dictate within a message;
• A link that has a referral ID on it can be manually removed by the user. With the short links, this isn’t feasible;
• Words that the resource where users will share it automatically blocks may be present in a full link. Examples of these stop words are “adult” or “gambling”. Needless to say, the best online casinos, including those at TopCasinoExpert.com, benefit greatly from shortening their hyperlinks.

Using custom domains and slugs (the back half of the URL), URL shorteners frequently allow you to brand your URLs so you can use short links to increase brand awareness and maintain total control over them. In addition to making business communication (internal and external) much simpler and more effective, URL shorteners for teams benefit companies in many other ways.

Benefits of Utilizing URL Shorteners

The following are a few major benefits of employing URL shorteners:

They Improve the Usability of Your Links

Longer URLs are harder to remember and distribute than short URLs; this is especially true when the short links are made up of straightforward, accessible terms rather than random alphanumeric characters.

For instance, zoom.us/xyzfjskxabc123 isn’t nearly as memorable as o/standup as a Zoom meeting location.

They Spruce up Your Correspondence

Marketers rely on including links to their content in emails, blogs, and social media postings in order to increase website traffic, encourage product signups, and turn leads into consumers.

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are typically included in marketing links in order to monitor click volume, quality, and source of traffic. They are thus rather lengthy. Extended URLs appear suspicious and spammy. Your target audience will find shorter URLs easier to read and comprehend.

They Provide Link Analytics

For shortened URLs, the majority of URL shorteners offer analytics. These can include everything from straightforward metrics like the number of hits and CTRs (click-through rates) on the links to in-depth information like click location, traffic source or channel, audience demographics, and a great deal more.

Analytics can be used to track access to internal URLs and modify the past activity of the short links.

They Improve the Recall of Brands and Offer Personalized Branding

Link shorteners allow you to alter the domain and slug of the abbreviated URL to match your brand name for a cost (and occasionally even for free).

As an illustration, the short URL bit.ly/xyz123 can be changed to the unique web address, e.g. nyti.ms/sports by The New York Times to point to its most recent sports content. The apparent advantages? An increased credibility and brand awareness.

They Could Boost Your Click-Through Rates

URL shorteners can raise CTRs by providing branded links. According to a Rebrandly experiment, CTRs for branded short links were 39% higher than those for generic short URLs.

To help readers understand the content of links that are short, it’s also beneficial to include relevant keywords in the link’s text.

They Might Assist with SEO

Backlinks are shortened URLs that are visible to the public. They transfer link juice, or authority, to your website as 301 redirects.

By sharing links to your blogs and landing pages across more platforms, you can increase your SEO (search engine optimization) by using a link-shortening service.

They Quicken the Discovery of Information

For every significant resource in your information base, you can efficiently establish a single source of reality by employing internal short URLs within your company. For instance, o/allhands can be the brief link to your monthly townhall/allhands meeting, and o/roadmap can be the shortcut to your product roadmap in Notion.

In this manner, colleagues won’t have to engage in a never-ending back-and-forth while seeking information (or links). Everyone is able to swiftly and naturally find what they need.

They Can Help You Save Money and Time

According to research conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC), a Fortune 500 business (Apple, Amazon, Walmart…) could avoid losing almost US$2 million in productivity each month if it provided its 4,000 employees with better information search and retrieval tools. Now they lose roughly US$31.5 billion a year on this.

Short internal URLs reduce the amount of time knowledge workers would otherwise spend (up to 20% of their workday) locating the information they need by expediting the process of knowledge discovery.

They Enable Content to Be Shared

As many as 72% of small companies operate websites.

In addition to helping website owners avoid having their URL appear spammy or suspicious, link shortening services also make it easier for them to share content with readers. A shorter link is simpler to copy and paste, and you can customize it by adding your brand name to make it more memorable.

What’s the Best Moment to Employ URL Shorteners?

Without a doubt, companies use URL-shortening services for a number of valid reasons. Enhanced brand recall, more clicks (and corresponding revenue) are generated by branded short links, and they also appear good.

However, are lengthy URLs always the “bad guys” that we paint them as? Apparently not really. Short URLs are beneficial for SEO, right? As it happens, lengthy URLs are preferable.

You may have encountered that links that are easy for Google and other search engines to crawl and index are better for SEO if they are human-readable. Longer URLs have the potential to be more evocative and contain a wealth of information about the page’s content. Consider one of our own URLs, for instance: https://www.way2earning.com/2023/10/seo-mistakes-you-should-avoid-in-2024/.

You may quickly determine the following from this URL:

• There’s a post from this year at this URL.
• The host of this URL is way2earning.com.
• This post’s topic is on avoiding SEO mistakes in 2024.

You get none of the information above from a short URL for the identical page, , so even though the post could be interesting to you, there’s no need to click on it or way to know what’s on it.

Many social media consumers frequently experience trust concerns for the same reasons when they see random links in posts. The trust that consumers have in brands might be damaged by generic short URLs.

All in all, when sharing a (branded) link on several websites, you should utilize a URL shortener. One link is simpler to monitor and maintain than hundreds. It also lends you credibility.

Internal short links are another convenient tool for departmental, team, and organizational communications. However, when connecting pages on your own website to one another, you should refrain from utilizing URL shorteners. Instead, use anchor text.

Nevertheless, there are situations in which short URLs vastly outperform large ones.

Shortened URLs: A Few Present Cases and Their Uses

The following are the most typical company-related uses for short links:

Hiring and Onboarding

Businesses can share materials like onboarding procedures, job descriptions, employee contracts, confidentiality agreements, policy documents, etc. by using branded short links in recruiting and onboarding emails.

For instance, Google might decide to use the unique short URL goo.gl/jd-frontend to offer a job description for a front-end developer.

Internal Correspondence

Shortened URLs can improve the clarity, polish, and professionalism of internal communications, including emails (like those inviting others to a meeting), memos, presentations, messages, and chats.

Some link management solutions, like OSlash, allow users to autocomplete (automatically insert) shortcuts using specified instructions, eliminating the need for users to copy and paste brief URLs into internal conversations.

Deep Linking to Application Pages

You can use deep hyperlinks to guide users to a particular page within your business’s iOS or Android app. What could pose a problem in this case? Deep links are extremely lengthy and include a huge number of arbitrary characters, similar to the book listed on Amazon, e.g. https://www.amazon.in/Bird-Some-Instructions-Writing-Life/dp/0385480016. It would be awesome if it just said http://amzn.to/BirdByBird.

Of course, you can use URL shorteners to make deep URLs more readable, memorable, and shorter!

Customer Support

Shorter (and branded) URLs can be effectively used in customer care emails and chats to convey information, resolve problems, and respond to queries. Using short URLs like shop.ify/faq or shop.ify/help, they can point clients toward knowledge bases, support centers, and FAQs.

Support teams can benefit from short URLs by creating and utilizing them, which will enable them to retrieve information more quickly, close tickets more rapidly, and improve customer satisfaction.

Establishing a Knowledge Base for the Company

Information that’s known to the public within an organization exists in all organizations.

Corporate regulations, admin processes, product roadmaps, organization charts, compensation advantages, and other centralized resources are frequently found on company intranets and wikis. These materials are accessible to everybody via the company VPN, for example.

Shortened URLs make it easy and quick to find any of this kind of information. For example, o/benefits for benefits in compensation, o/roadmap for product roadmaps, and o/org-chart for the organizational chart.

Additionally, you can control and modify these brief links so that:

• you can update the destination document (for example, by replacing the roadmap with a later version and maintaining the short link x/roadmap) without altering the connection in any way,
• you can, without having to alter the underlying document, update the link if it no more works (for example, rename x/roadmap to x/roadmap-2021, x/roadmap-2022, and so on, since you add newer roadmaps each year without wanting to remove the existing ones).

The next natural step after having single sources of truth for shared resources would be to compile them into an enterprise knowledge center, where anyone can sign in and quickly discover what they need.

Omnichannel Advertising

Shortened URLs (and sometimes QR codes) are an excellent way to move potential customers closer to conversion whether you’re utilizing digital marketing, print advertising, or traditional outdoor marketing with billboards and signs. They even function on offline channels since, in contrast to lengthy URLs, they are simple to read and remember.

Additionally, you shouldn’t be concerned about your URLs getting longer because you added parameters known as UTM to them. Once you “trim” the original URL, the UTM parameters are incorporated into the link that’s shortened, so you don’t lose out on important click and traffic data. Your campaigns can be optimized with the help of the data points you monitor, all without forcing users to click on an obvious or careless link.

The Top 5 Platforms to Short URLs

Your company, internal communications, branding, and staff productivity can all be greatly enhanced by using a URL shortener. These are a few of the top URL shorteners that can help your company get the most value possible.

• Bitly

Most people automatically think of Bitly when they think of a URL shortener. Bitly makes creating short links really easy. To shorten the link, simply copy it and paste it into the input form on the page.

You may check the performance of URLs, including CTRs, click locations, devices, referring sites, etc., in addition to shortening them. For instance, this aids companies in monitoring and enhancing their marketing initiatives.

While Bitly doesn’t require an account to use for URL shortening, in order to get link analytics, custom domains, and branded links, you’ll need to subscribe to one of the premium plans.

Most important features:

• QR codes and mobile deep links
• Custom domains for branded links
• Integrations with popular digital marketing tools
• Real-time link analytics
• Tags
• HTTPS encryption

 

• Rebrandly

Similar to Bitly, Rebrandly is a publicly accessible URL shortener that’s perfect for companies who want to use a custom domain name for branding, tracking, and sharing short links. Rebrandly is different from other branded URL shorteners in that it offers four customizable options for any given URL. In contrast to Bitly, Rebrandly provides 500 branded links for free and allows you to utilize up to 5 unique domain names.

Most important features:

• Workspaces and teammates
• Custom domains for branded links
• Traffic routing, QR codes, and deep linking
• Customized analytics
• HTTPS encryption
• UTM builder and UTM presets
• Tags

 

• OSlash

A commercial link management solution called OSlash turns awkward URLs into concise, easy-to-read shortcuts. Teams of any size can explore, manage, and exchange information more quickly when they use OSlash to name connections.

OSlash is more of a tool for productivity that can save you up to 10 hours per week searching for information than it is a standard URL shortener for teams. Traditional URL shorteners allow you to create short links that are visible to the world, while OSlash shortcuts are only accessible to those inside your organization and are tightly regulated by permissions and access controls. As a result, it’s less susceptible to security problems like phishing scams, dangerous URLs, and other online threats.

Most important features:

• Collections to group your related links in folders
• Workspaces and teammates
• Autocomplete for faster link-sharing in emails and text editors
• Omnibox Search to surface the right information quickly
• Shortcuts insights
• Custom domains to brand your links
• Tags

 

• ink

Bl.ink is among the more reasonably priced public-facing URL shorteners on our list, making it a great option for small enterprises. You may track up to 1,000 clicks on each link, create 1,000 active short links, and build a custom domain to create branded links with its free plan. Additionally, it has tags that make it simple to arrange and display your abbreviated URLs.

Most important features:

• Broken link discovery
• Custom domains
• Third-party integrations
• Link analytics

 

• TinyURL

With the ultimate goal of removing long URLs completely from your social media, email marketing, or customer communications, as they state, TinyURL promises to provide you with full-blown link management capabilities.

In the event that you lack interest in link analytics, this might be a simple and fast way for you to shorten URLs. The user interface is clear and the setup is easy. Many processes are automated, one of which is duplicating the URL that’s shortened.

Unlike the other services on this list, each subscription plan allows tracking for an infinite number of connections, even though the free plan lacks statistics.

Most important features:

• Links that always perform and never expire
• Custom domains for branded links
• Real-time analytics in subscription plans

Ways URL Shorteners Assist in Internal and Business Communications

URL shorteners have several internal applications spanning all departments and functions, making them invaluable tools for enhancing team productivity, communication, and teamwork.

Easy-to-remember and share short links promote employee adoption of and interaction with the firm knowledge resource. By centrally discovering and providing access to FAQs and other vital information, they free up employees’ valuable time so they can focus more productively on work that makes a difference.

Is there anything else? Yes, it is. Without making it available to everyone at the firm, teams can utilize custom domains as well as access controls to share information with particular people who have a legitimate need to know. When employees receive this knowledge, it gives them helpful context.

Final Words

Are you trying to find the ideal link shortener for your company? You might prefer services like Bitly and Rebrandly that provide branded short URLs that are visible to the public, depending on your use case(s).

Alternatively, you may use a more internal technology like OSlash, which provides thorough link management for your company.

The choice is yours so get started!