We have just lunched a new service at TowerUp, a url shortener with a cool domain name for the telecom industry towr.co
With this service you can create simple QR codes or use them in text messages or Twitter tweets for instance. It is easy to use and already available with all subscription plans at TowerUp for the moment.
Where to use short URLs?
We can list several use cases where short urls might be handy, but I would like to highlight three areas now.
- Sharing links with friends or colleagues
- Embed data into QR codes
- Send links in text messages
Sharing links
When you drop a link to your friend or college for a shared file or some interesting product, probably you are not so concerned about the length of the link. It might be just "ugly" but can do its job. But in case there is a constrained about the length of the message, then a shortening service can come handy. This can be a Twitter tweet for instance. There you have currently a 280 characters limit which is already an increased limit from the original 140. Even in emails if you pay attention for aesthetics, there is also a good idea to shorten a link and avoid a long url which sometimes scary for some people to click on (fear of spams) or just takes a lot of space from an email.
An additional advantage of short links is data insight. With short urls you can have simple statistics about how many times your link was clicked, for instance. This is a basic feature for many service providers, and we have the same at TowerUp. Once you create a short url with towr.co then you can follow up how many times your link was clicked. This is very useful when you launch an online marketing campaign and you want to see which performs the best.
QR codes
When you create QR codes, it's complexity (here I mean the visual image of the code) depends on the length of the information you have embed into the code. Below you can see two QR codes. One for the original URL for a product on eBay, the second one the same but with a shortened url.
Some QR scanner apps can struggle to read the complex data due to the resolution on a hard copy or soft copy. It can be a good idea to shorten the data but still have the original content available for the reader. In fact, I tried to read the first QR code with my free QR code reader on my iPhone but without any success. While the second one was easily read with the same app.
Text messages
One good example for using short urls when someone sends a link to an electronic invoice in a text message. My favourite taxi company sends me the bill once I got out from the cab after a trip. They also use URL shortener, so they can send plenty of data in the original URL. In some mobile network and on some mobil device the characters are not a concern, but when it is, then a shortening can be a good idea.
You can see in the below image that the text message is not longer than maybe 77 characters, but if I navigate to the link then the original URL itself is 184 characters.
If you want to see how to use towr.co URL shortener, then please see below a short introduction video how it works.
