In this video, I’m going to show you how to put URL or website links into your Twitter post. Now, of course, this is very easy to do, but since Twitter limits each tweet message to just 140 characters, so therefore, if you copy, for example, a URL to this particular article from New York Times, and let’s say I paste the entire link into here. So what happens is that now, I only have 79 characters left for which I can compose a message. And this is really a waste of space because naturally, you’d want to put more text into here, perhaps to explain what this article is about, and have the link become as short as possible.
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So to do that, what you really need to do is use a URL shortening service. There are a lot of such services online on the Internet, but let me give you two very popular ones. The first is bit.ly. And to get to this site, you just type in bit.ly. That’s it; there’s no.com, etc.; it’s just bit.ly. So let’s paste that link earlier into here, and click on Shorten.
Okay – so now you get this very, very short URL which will in fact redirect to the actual URL of the New York Times article that you’ve seen earlier. And another popular service that has been around for a very long time is tinyurl.com. So let’s try that; I’m gonna paste the original URL into here and click on Make TinyURL. Okay, and this is the very tiny URL that we get using this service; so now, I’m going to go back to Twitter, and instead the long URL, I’m just gonna paste a very short one. Okay? So you can see that I still have 114 characters left, so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna paste the title of the article into here; okay, and I’m gonna put a space between the title and the URL, and you can see that I still have 57 characters left. So when I’m pretty much certain of the title – I’m gonna put title here – and especially if you are actually redirecting this link to your own website, so you want the title to be as compelling as possible, so you can actually have a lot more space to put a very compelling and interesting title instead of a very long URL. And then just click on Tweet…alright, and now, you can see the entire new tweet message that I have here; this is the text that I wanna use, and this is the very, very short version of the URL. So what happens when someone clicks on this URL is they get taken to the very same article that I showed you earlier.
So that’s how easy it is to start putting URLs, or website links, into your Twitter messages.