Last year when Twitter announced that media attachments and links would no longer count toward their 140-character limit, marketers embraced the opportunity for more words, but still relied on the convenience and simplicity of URL shorteners. However, often times when users are confronted by a random string of characters, it’s so hard for them to know what it is they’re navigating to without some context. Not only is that a user-safety issue, but it’s a missed marketing opportunity as well. That’s why we are starting to see Branded Short Links come into play.
Services that shorten links for social media like Bit.ly, Po.st, Google URL, Rebrandly and more, continue to have a lot of value. But the same problems we had with generic short links last year are still problems today. How does a user know to trust what they’re clicking on and how does a generic link actually enhance the tweeter’s brand? The answer to both is that they don’t.
As it turns out, the biggest benefit of the Branded Short Link—the fact that it’s short—is still a major selling point. But the growth potential of Branded Short Links is really among the crowd that wants better, more engaging and trusted ways to communicate with their audience. And now, thanks to some more proactive brand protection services and some organic momentum behind short domains, we’re beginning to see several big names get in on the Branded Short Link game. Services like Rebrandly are seeing Branded Short Links improve marketing efforts by up to 30 percent. Bitly manages 55,000 branded short domains through its Bitly Brand Tools platform and works with some of largest brands in the world—including 21 of the Forbes top 25 brands and 37 of the top 50 comScore web properties. Bitly has found that short domains drive up to a 34 percent increase in CTR when compared to unbranded Links. Companies like Po.st have seen click volume boosted by 25 percent with their branded vanity domains.
Over our last couple of editions of DomainSpotting and over at Showcase.ninja, we saw recognizable brands starting to use .SOCIAL Branded Short Links: Microsoft, Chick-Fil-A, Lindt Chocolate, and the New York Jets. We’ve actually been made aware of so many others, we didn’t even have room to include the likes of GoDaddy and Trump Hotels. We’re even seeing the trend in some of our other domain extensions: Etsy used Etsy.studio to announce the launch of their new Etsy Studio project, Apple has Apple.news to share stories over iOS, and the People/EW Network uses PEN.live as a convenient acronym for social media.
As big names and companies move from just using short domains as a way to save characters and measure links, to embracing Branded Short Links, TLDs are the perfect opportunity to fully release the power of the link to personalize and elevate their brand on social media. This is an exciting time for TLDs as brands go beyond strictly brand protection and start recognizing them as true brand enhancement, extensions like .SOCIAL (as well as .NEWS, .LIVE, and others). With the data from all Branded Short Link providers continues to showcase demonstrable ROI with specific marketing campaigns, we will continue to see more use in Branded Short Links.
New TLDs contain some of the best keyword matches for businesses, brands, and individuals to better describe the content of their links, whether using a short domain directly for call to action campaigns or using a Branded Short Link platform. As brands compete for trust and engagement on social media, this new trend in embracing Branded Short Links on social media will only grow.
