With the rise of social networking sites like Twitter, the shortening of URLs to share links and documents with others has become a necessity. Sites such as bit.ly and Google have proved the most popular way of doing this up until now.

But as mobile marketing professionals become increasingly social media-savvy in an effort to reach more customers, organisations are looking to create their own short URLs to further extend their online brand. For example, Facebook uses http://fb.me, YouTube uses http://youtu.be, and Coca-Cola uses http://cokeurl.com to link to their websites, which seem to be commonly used and shared among the social media community.

Small link, big impact

One of the main benefits of short, branded URLs is that they can increase trust, as users can be reluctant to open links that are sent to them, particularly if they don’t know the sender. Just recently, Symantec claimed that short URLs are the latest weapon for cyber-criminals, with rogue links resulting in phishing and malware attacks on unsuspecting users.

With this in mind, having personalised, shortened URLs that people recognise, such as http://youtu.be, is likely to increase the chances of them clicking on the link. Given the trend for re-tweeting on Twitter, having a branded URL could lead to a lot of potential exposure for brands, as users see a company-specific URL, rather than a random link from a conventional URL shortener, which they trust and can share with others to generate more brand awareness.

This could prove a very successful tactic in the mobile marketing world. Marketers are increasingly targeting customers and potential consumers on the move, while at the same time, these consumers are increasingly accessing their social media accounts, browsing and shopping for products on their mobile phones. If they feel confident to click through and share links to offers and promotions they are sent, this can only be a good thing for mobile marketers, in terms of increasing brand awareness and sales.

The shortcomings
Given that it’s the bigger brands like Facebook and You Tube which are currently using short, branded URLs, mobile marketers might be wondering whether their smaller brands will be as successful. After all, people might not recognise branded links to websites they are less familiar with. Also, the branded URLs have to be memorable enough for people to use them regularly, and share them with others, in order to truly have an impact.

Another drawback is potentially missing out on some of the features offered by third-party services, which will help increase traffic to websites. For example, Bit.ly recently launched news.me – an app that lets users browse, discover and read articles that other people are seeing in their Twitter streams, based on the use of its links. However, if the main purpose of a personalised URL is to generate brand awareness, using third-party services won’t really help achieve this.

If mobile marketers decide to go down the specialised URLs route, they will have to do all they can to make sure they can compete with the bigger brands and stand out from the crowd, by using instantly-recognisable URLs that either include part of the company name, or relate to their product or service. Or both.

Choosing domain names
The first step for mobile marketers creating these short URLs is to carefully pick and register the right domain names. The internet is becoming increasingly crowded, so brands may not always get their first choice of name. This means they’ll often need to look at international domains such as .de and .nl, as the likes of .com, .net and .co.uk domains are in short supply. To add to this, some country code top-level domains can be very expensive. It is therefore important to prepare for this by drawing up a shortlist of several suitable shortened URLs, and check that they are affordable and not already taken. 

It is then advisable to find a suitable hosting service. If the mobile marketer is expecting a vast surge of people accessing the site through the shortened URL, they’ll need adequate server capacity to cope with the traffic, so a dedicated or virtual server may well be required. If fewer numbers are anticipated, then a simpler solution should be sufficient.

Making the cut
In this increasingly competitive market, mobile marketers really need to be thinking of ways to innovate and stand out from the crowd. Social media is, or should be, very much at the top of their agenda in terms of generating and increasing brand awareness. But there are a plethora of tactics that can be used, which need to be considered. If mobile marketers chose to follow in the footsteps of the bigger brands, we could soon see many of these shortened, branded URLs creeping into social networks, which may well have the potential to increase traffic and brand loyalty.

Andreas Edler is managing director at Hostway UK