How to shorten URLs for your Twitter posts

Twitter is an amazing tool. We’ve already discussed why you should be using Twitter in an earlier article. There are a couple of challenges that you’ll encounter as you become a more avid tweeter. One of the most important ones to overcome is that you need to keep your posts to 140 characters at most. This is not as simple as it sounds especially when you are doing something like sharing a link to another site. URLs are not short and you’ll find them taking up a significant number of precious characters.

As you can see from the image above, this can become a serious problem. Fortunately there is a very simple solution to this problem. All you have to do is to utilize one of the URL shortening services that are freely available on the Web. There are many to choose from, but the one I recommend is bit.ly which has several other features once you create a free account including the ability to view click statistics over time.

So lets head on over to http://bit.ly and create an account. Once you’ve done that, log in to your account and paste in the long URL you want to share. This site is also useful for sharing links in other forms as well, for example link sharing in your e-mails and blogs. It’s especially useful for Twitter though because of the above-mentioned character count limitations.

Once you enter the URL, bit.ly gives you a cool shortened version to share with others. In truth you don’t even need to register an account, but then you will have no way of tracking the statistics of how many people clicked on the link and some other useful features that are only available to registered users of the site.

You’ll end up with a cool abbreviated version of the URL as you can see in the image above. This URL can be used in your Twitter tweets. It will not only save valuable character real-estate, but you’ll also be able to get invaluable statistics such as the ones shown below:

Nice and simple and you get the extra benefits on top of the core URL shortening feature.