Lately I have been spending time observing how various small businesses use social media.  It’s interesting to see how different companies tie the various social media platforms they use together.  It’s even more interesting to see that some companies do not tie them together at all.  Information that is shared on Facebook, for example, is not shared on Twitter.  This concept was baffling to me.  Why wouldn’t a company share their good news to all of their friends/followers?  I couldn’t come up with one good reason.

Then it occurred to me that these companies are very new to social media and have not yet learned about the tools available to them to make sharing information across at least some of the platforms much easier.  These tools are free and easy to use but can make life much easier.  

One company I observed shared information about articles written about them on Facebook but never shared them on Twitter.    The link address that they used to direct people to the articles was very long.  In fact, the link itself was probably 140 characters or more so it would be impossible to share that on Twitter.

This is when a tool called a link shortener comes in handy.  The one that we use is bit.ly.  It’s extremely easy to use and you can shorten any link with it.  For example, the address to this post is “http://www.organicbusinessstrategies.com/2010/03/22/online-tools-the-long-and-short-of-it.”  It’s a fairly long address but not as long as some.  The shortened address however is http://bit.ly/96lnvF.  This is a much more manageable address to share on any social media platform but especially on Twitter where the number of characters you have available is limited.

All you have to do is go to bit.ly and set up an account.  From there, all that is required is that you paste your long link in the space provided and then it automatically generates a short link for you.  Just that quick.  Also, if you are interested, you can see how many people click on that bit.ly link.

So, share your good news everywhere without worrying about character limitations.  Go to bit.ly right now and set up your account.

We’ll be sharing information about other tools that will help in the next couple of posts.  If there is something specific you need help with, feel free to leave a comment on this post or contact us.  We’d be glad to help.

Photo credit:  didibear